Industry news

Accenture has completed its acquisition of SOPIA Corporation, a privately held, Tokyo-based consulting and Information Technology solutions company specializing in Oracle systems integration.

SOPIA will come under the umbrella of Accenture Japan expanding its Oracle capabilities and customer base in the country. The move comes in response to a rise in demand for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in Japan.

“The acquisition is complementary,” said Karl-Heinz Floether, group chief executive of Systems Integration, Technology & Delivery at Accenture. “Accenture benefits from SOPIA’s skills across the entire Oracle suite and supply-chain management software packages, while SOPIA gains access to Accenture’s industry expertise, broad skills in systems integration and its global reach.”  

British Sky Broadcasting, operator of the UK’s largest digital pay television platform and fastest growing broadband provider, has recently equipped its field service team with hard-wearing mobile computers from Intermec.

BSkyB has purchased over 2,000 of the compact Intermec CN3 handheld computers with an extended life battery with an aim of aiding integration between the entertainment company’s engineers and support systems.

BSkyB engineers will now receive updated work instructions throughout the day via GPRS, which will also be used to send job details back to the company’s central IT system once a job has been completed. Through the use of the Intermec CN3 devices, BSkyB expects to benefit from exceptionally user-friendly communication tools for their people as well as a greater capacity to manage exceptions on the day.

As Marion Scott, Head of Supply Chain Development at BSkyB commented: “Intermec was awarded the contract because the CN3 out-performed all other handhelds. The units have now been successfully rolled out to the field and are playing an important supporting role towards our goal of delivering outstanding customer service.”

Paul Smith, CEO of offshore software services, Harvey Nash received the Gold Partner award for outstanding contribution to Vietnam’s software industry at last night’s Sao Khue awards in Hanoi.

The awards ceremony, hosted by the Vietnam Software Association (VINASA), honours individuals and organisations that have helped develop and champion Vietnam's software industry. The country's Deputy Prime Minister, Nguyen Thien Nhan, presented the awards and praised the significant contribution that the sector has made to the country’s socio-economic development.

Commenting on his award, Paul Smith, said: “I am flattered and touched that the people of Vietnam have presented me with this Gold Partner award. Harvey Nash has been working in Vietnam for over eight years now and will continue to invest significantly in its people and infrastructure. Vietnam is a highly attractive offshore destination and has all the ingredients to become the leading market choice in the next few years.”

Butler Group, Europe’s leading IT research and advisory organisation, has released wide-scale report stating that ‘communications architecture that has evolved over the last 20 years no longer meets the requirements of today’s organisations’. This is likely to lead to a spate of outsourcing deals as companies try to bring themselves up to date.

The report ‘Communications and Collaboration Report – Laying the Foundations for Business Process Flexibility’ says that organisations are moving ‘from traditional hierarchies based on command and control, to looser structures utilising collaboration and team work shifting from one-to-one to many-to-many communication’.

The report also found that in order to keep up with the modern business world and enable flexibility, enterprises require IP-based infrastructures to capitalise on information mobility. This new communication infrastructure will aid the development of decentralised business models where location of the workforce is no longer a key issue; something that mobile working is making a necessity.

Mark Blowers, Enterprise Architectures Practice Director at Butler Group and co-author of the study said: “The need for new and enhanced service provision to support business requirements must drive infrastructure and technology deployment. There should be a move towards the provision of common integrated communication services, which are ideal for catering for a complex and distributed environment. Web services can also be utilised to mobilise information to all stakeholders”.

“The componentisation and services-based approach increases flexibility, enabling services to be developed independent of the equipment. Using IP-based components instead of vendor-dependent solutions improves scalability, along with driving down infrastructure costs with price/performance optimisation.”

TDX Group, the provider of analytics-based debt management solutions, and BancTec, a global provider of advanced, high-volume document and payment processing services and solutions, are working together to provide financial institutions with a fully managed IVA processing outsource service.

TDX Group formed “The Insolvency Exchange” 17 months ago and, with BancTec supplying the processing systems, is now providing a full end-to-end insolvency management platform that processes Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) proposals on behalf of creditors, analytically decides which proposals to accept, optimises the lifetime return and manages each IVA through the 5 year term of the arrangement.

BancTec’s experience in mail room business process outsourcing (BPO) in the financial sector and ability to automate and streamline document and labour intensive transactional processes, brings the latest technologies and a business process infrastructure capable of efficiently processing all IVA cases and debtor payments. This significantly reduces the time taken for all IVAs handled through TIX, ensuring each IVA is properly considered.

Says Carol Hine, Head of TIX Operations, “By employing BancTec’s payment and document processing competences, which greatly improves our processing timelines, TDX Group is left to focus on its own core competences of analytics-based debt management.”

Processing IVA proposals is labour-intensive as they tend to be non-standard, with pertinent information scattered throughout the document. Without appropriate management systems this can lead to duplication, delays, and lost paperwork. “However”, says Carol Hine, “outsourcing has dramatically improved the average time for each proposal to be appropriately processed. One of our clients is now seeing savings of between 10% - 20% of the total value of debt being written off. The total of debt write-offs in 2006 was over €10 billion and the TIX programme is leading to some considerable savings for a major High Street bank.”

TIX and BancTec are now working with the major practitioners and the Insolvency Service to formulate common standards to apply across the IVA process throughout the industry. Currently the TIX platform now handles approximately 80% of all IVAs completed within the UK. Many new customers have come on-board the TIX platform to share similar benefits including some of the largest creditor organisations in the country.

EDS has been awarded a seven-year, $391 million contract by the US state of Georgia to design, develop and implement a new-generation Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS). The new system will provide fiscal agent and enrollment broker services and establish electronic health records (EHRs) for Medicaid recipients.

The EDS Georgia interChange system will provide the platform to support delivery of fiscal agent services to Georgia's 45,000 Medicaid providers, who annually care for more than 1.2 million beneficiaries. Georgia operates the nation's eighth-largest Medicaid program in the nation.

The contract returns EDS to Georgia as the state's fiscal agent after a five-year hiatus and brings to 22 the number of states for which EDS serves as fiscal agent or principal IT provider. EDS previously served as the state's fiscal agent from 1986-2003.

In addition to providing claims processing for health care providers and enabling EHRs for Medicaid recipients, the Web-based system will provide Georgia with greater flexibility. It also will provide the state with data analysis about health care trends and outcomes of Georgia's Medicaid population to assess needs and impacts of current programs. Additionally, the system will help the state identify potential fraud and abuse.

HP has announced new and enhanced quality and management software designed to increase the success of mainstream deployment of service-oriented architectures (SOA) by businesses. SOA is an approach to delivering IT services in a secure and manageable way that uses loosely connected, reusable and standards-based technology that can be quickly aligned to changing business needs. For SOA to be broadly adopted and deliver business value, an entire organization must have confidence that the services it provides function correctly, scale as demand increases and meet operational requirements.

To make certain that services meet all functional and performance objectives and are ready for production deployment, HP has introduced new versions of its SOA testing products, HP Service Test and HP Service Test Management.

“Customers who want to scale their SOA-based deployments recognize they must make SOA a seamless part of their quality and management infrastructure to support business requirements,” said Tim Hall, director of SOA products, Software, HP.

Infosys, Tata and Wipro are among the Indian companies celebrating the news that the Indian government has finally decided to extend a tax holiday scheme, which has benefited the growth of the local outsourcing market, by a year. The expiry of the tax holiday for Indian outsourcers based in technology parks has been extended until March 2010 from March 2009.

The original expiry date could have seen corporate tax rates of 12% and upwards rise to as high as 22%.

One of the major factors behind the Indian IT sourcing phenomenon has been the development of Software Technology Parks of India (STPI), which began in in 1991, and saw designated companies receiving a decade's worth of income tax exemption. Recently, debate has raged as to whether the country can afford not to tax some of the most successful multi-billion dollar enterprises doing business in its cities.

"We are very happy with the announcement," said Som Mittal, president of leading IT lobby group, NASSCOM. The relief is twofold: the Indian Government has been anxious that the country’s national champions may themselves up sticks, and take their business out of India to alternative sourcing locations.

• Indian nerves have certainly been frayed this week. Wipro was hit by rumours of a mass exodus of senior executives in the wake of news that P R Chandrasekar, president, Americas and Europe, had resigned.

Accenture's CEO has swept aside any fears of his company being impacted by the global credit crunch.

Speaking to the Indian media during a week-long tour of the country, William Green said, “We have not seen any cancellations or deferrals of business deals yet.”

Mr. Green said that within the company's in-house use of the ‘Made in Bangalore’ label signified the extent to which the company regarded Bangalore as a centre of innovation, say local reports.

Consulting and outsourcing giant Capgemini has announced its seventh annual Vision & Reality study: Customer Value Integration – How to Re-Tune Pharma’s Commercial Model in Light of Changing Stakeholder Influence, which reveals that pharmaceutical companies can remain profitable and maximise customer value in today’s market by aligning their efforts to address the shifting power between physicians and patients through better collaboration with industry stakeholders and influencers such as physicians, payers, insurance companies and government bodies.

Capgemini surveyed more than 100 pharmaceutical and payer executives from Health Management Organizations (HMOs), insurance companies and government bodies worldwide, facilitated an advisory board session with leading physicians, and conducted research to assess how pharmaceutical companies are responding to the changing stakeholder landscape. While business transformation in the industry is inherent to adapt to this shift, responses to survey questions suggested a perception gap between how executives view the market evolution and how they respond to it.

The study suggests that the power of the physician has declined in comparison to the increasing influence of patients and payers over the last decade. Today’s prescription decision-making process involves a complex set of interactions between stakeholders and influencers that the pharmaceutical industry needs to address. The combination of these stakeholders varies significantly depending on the therapeutic area and product lifecycle maturity of a drug and the previous “one size fits all” model is too slow and inefficient to address this shift. While traditional stakeholder,, such as physicians, still exert an influence and assume an important role for prescription decisions, new and influential stakeholders are beginning to re-shape how prescriptions are made.

“While pharmaceuticals are finding it difficult to adapt to this fundamental shift in stakeholder influence, customer value integration – that is to say identifying customer needs and expected value then aligning a company’s core competencies to meet those needs - is a fundamental shift that will reshape the face of the industry in the next three to five years,” said Omar Chane, vice president of the Life Sciences Practice at Capgemini. “While the industry has been trying to address the shift in the market through adjustments of key capabilities, the pace of change is going to increase, and the industry is going to witness a more fundamental structural change.”

The study includes insights into the degree of change in the pharmaceutical industry and the barriers to effectively deal with this change:

* 51% of participants viewed the changes in the pharmaceutical marketplace as structural, while 38% found them incremental, and nearly 11% described them as temporary.

* 79% of participants suggested more payer / pricing pressure as one of the top three market forces driving the change in the industry. The other market forces most commonly cited include more government influence (55%), and increasing regulatory requirements (47%).

* 63% of participants named organizational adaptation as one of the most important capabilities pharmaceutical companies need to develop to respond to new market challenges. The wish-list of capabilities also included market analytics and segmentation capabilities (47%) and customer needs assessment know-how (43%).

Each year since 2001, Capgemini’s Life Sciences practice examines a specific topic that is both timely and urgent for the life sciences industry.