Industry news

Bangalore, India, London and Sheffield, United Kingdom – September 21, 2018: Wipro Limited, a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company, today announced partnerships with two leading UK academic institutions – King’s College London and Sheffield Hallam University, for strengthening STEM education in state schools in the United Kingdom.

Wipro will partner with King’s College London, to support the development of the first Master of Arts in STEM Education in the UK, and Sheffield Hallam University to offer the ‘Wipro Teacher Fellowship’ and ‘Wipro Teacher Mentor’ programmes. Both initiatives aim to provide high quality continuing professional development to early and mid-career educators, to address the shortfall and high turnover of STEM teachers in the UK.

Wipro will support King’s College London in developing the curriculum for a proposed Master of Arts in STEM education course, which will take a blended learning approach, involving face-to-face as well as online learning. The company will also offer bursaries to cover up to 80% of tuition fees, to ensure accessibility of the course for diverse cohorts of in-service teachers and educators from within and outside London. There will be a strong focus on attracting teachers from Opportunity Areas. Wipro will also support Sheffield Hallam University to launch and run the ‘Wipro Teacher Fellowship’ and ‘Wipro Teacher Mentor’ programmes. The 18-months programmes, which will commence in January 2019, and will support early career teachers of STEM subjects and STEM teacher mentors from schools in Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley, Doncaster and Derbyshire.

Both partnerships will address crucial issues in the UK by generating more interest in STEM subjects, developing higher standards of teaching, and investing in teacher retention, especially in the national ‘social mobility cold spots’.

London, UK and Boulder, Colorado: Eggplant, the provider of user-centric, intelligent testing and performance solutions, has released Eggplant RPA: an intelligent Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution, harnessing Eggplant’s unique and patented Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) capabilities.

DAI was designed initially for test automation, however it has evolved into something that can automate anything a person can do, including intelligently understanding and acting on screen images and text and driving any application through keyboard and mouse inputs. Eggplant’s unique automation technology is already widely used for RPA use cases across a variety of industry sectors. These use cases range from database migration and audit trails for federal organizations, to security patches for hospital servers, to marketing automation. Eggplant has also used RPA to convert and migrate over 500,000 files for a document management platform, speeding up processes and reducing mundane, repetitive tasks for employees without the risk of human error during manual entry.

Antony Edwards, CTO of Eggplant commented “Although the Robotic Process Automation industry is fairly new, Eggplant has a long heritage in automating the un-automatable. Our customers have naturally used Eggplant for all kinds of automation including RPA and so it is was listening to our customers and looking at their use cases, that lead us to create Eggplant RPA. When faced with the prospect of RPA, many organizations believe that it is too technical and that a lot of developers need to be involved. However, with the powerful modelling and fusion automation of Eggplant RPA, we are proving this is simply not the case.”

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LONDON, England – September 20, 2018 -- RingCentral UK, Ltd., a leading provider of enterprise cloud communications and collaboration solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE:RNG), has been selected by Pharmacy2U, the UK's largest online pharmacy, as its central communication platform to help it deliver a truly customer-centric contact centre experience to support its rapid growth.

Pharmacy2U helps over 240,000 people across the country manage their NHS repeat prescriptions. Set up by a team of pharmacists in 1999, Pharmacy2U was a founding partner to the NHS in developing the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS).

“We are adding around 7,000 patients per week, which is the equivalent of 16 new High Street pharmacies opening each month, and our aim is to allow people to contact us using the method that suits them best, whether that’s by phone, email, or webchat,” said Andy Williams, Director of Customer Care for Pharmacy2U. “With RingCentral, we have an innovative and industry-proven platform that will allow us to deliver a truly unified communication experience and continue to deliver the highest levels of customer service while driving efficiency across the business.”

RingCentral Contact Centre™ is an omnichannel solution that helps people using Pharmacy2U to choose their preferred method of communicating, via voice, chat, SMS, email, and more. The platform includes intelligent IVR and self-service options that are tightly integrated with smart routing functionality to help patients connect more quickly to the advisor who can best handle their needs. The platform also includes tools to help Pharmacy2U optimise staff scheduling and improve contact centre efficiencies. Pharmacy2U is already using RingCentral Glip to help manage the system integration and migration project.

“Pharmacy2U is an innovator in the health industry that is making a real difference to people across the country,” said Steven Rafferty, Regional Vice President of Enterprise Sales, EMEA at RingCentral. “We’re proud to help them deliver a seamless patient experience through our open and flexible platform. We look forward to identifying new ways to partner with Pharmacy2U as they continue to expand.”

ABSL have announced their jury for the upcoming ABSL Diamonds Awards on the 5th December. The jury has been comprised of four members including President and CEO of the Global Sourcing Association Kerry Hallard and Christian Mertin, Global Advisory Solutions Leader at EY.

ABSL Diamonds is the most prestigious sector awards, recognizing companies which implemented the most innovative projects enhancing their business and strengthening the business services sector’s position as the powerhouse of the economy. Every year the aim is to identify successful activities in business services sector, promote best practices, encourage and inspire other companies to follow the best ones.

UiPath, Romania’s first IT unicorn, tripled its value in six months after receiving $225 million in a new funding round from Sequoia Capital and Google’s CapitalG, the WSJ reports. The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software provider, currently a market leader, began as a Bucharest-based startup founded by a team of ten led by Daniel Dines, the company’s CEO and Marius Tirca (CTO).

The new funding round, led by Sequoia Capital and Capital G, comes six months after the company raised $153 million from Accel, Capital G and KP, and saw its valuation shoot to $1 billion, achieving unicorn status. So far, the company has received USD 400 million in funding.

"After years toiling in obscurity, three startups have suddenly hit the jackpot in a corner of the enterprise-software market sprinkled with artificial intelligence,” the WSJ writes about UiPath Inc., Blue Prism Group PLC and Automation Anywhere Inc. “Now they are racing to one-up each other to appear the market leader.”

NewVoiceMedia, a leading global provider of cloud contact centre and inside sales solutions, today announced that SecOps firm Rapid7 has selected the NVM Platform to deliver a personalised, exceptional experience to its globally expanding customer base.

Rapid7 powers the practice of SecOps by delivering shared visibility, analytics and automation that unites security, IT and DevOps teams. Headquartered in Boston, Rapid7 serves more than 7,100 customers in 120+ countries, including 55 percent of the Fortune 100.

Rapid7 selected NewVoiceMedia’s cloud contact centre solution for its integration with the organisation’s CRM system, which will enable the service team to instantly access customer engagement histories and personalise each interaction. With service agents located around the globe, Rapid7 is also leveraging NVM’s global call routing architecture, Global Voice Assurance. It will allow the service team to manage its resources across the globe as a single entity, reducing customer wait times while ensuring reliable call quality and service availability for calls in remote regions.

The NVM Platform will also provide a real-time window into Rapid7’s entire support operation, with automatic call logging, recording and customisable reporting features that will allow the support team to understand where improvement opportunities exist.

“Rapid7 is deeply committed to providing our customers with a personalised and exceptional experience every time they interact with our organisation, our products, and our services”, says Rajeev Jaswal, CIO at Rapid7. “We needed a reliable cloud contact centre solution that would integrate seamlessly with our CRM, and, NewVoiceMedia met those needs”.

Chris Haggis, SVP Customer Success at NewVoiceMedia, adds, “We’re delighted to be working with Rapid7 and look forward to seeing the company transform its customer service and business efficiencies. Customer experience is becoming the primary tool for companies to differentiate, and NVM will help Rapid7 outcompete on CX by making every conversation great. Additionally, our true cloud solutions are completely flexible and scalable and will continue to support the business throughout its future expansion".

LONDON, Hotellobot (07/09/18)- Hotellobot is an ingenious guest information service software that can be paired with Hotellobot Robot Hardware to make the world’s first and only personal hotel concierge robot.

Hotellobot Software can be used in conjunction with Amazon Dot Voice Hardware, Amazon Spot Screen Hardware or Hotellobot Robot Hardware to provide an exceptional, user-friendly, guest information system. With a vocal command or touch of the screen, depending on which hardware is used, Hotellobot is able to provide guests with information specific to their hotel stay - including menus and timetables.

It is the combination of Hotellobot Software and Hotellobot Robot Hardware that provides an altogether unique concierge assistant to guests and staff alike - the first of its kind worldwide. Hotellobot Robot Hardware can be connected to a network of staff smart watches, allowing guests to request concierge services from the comfort of their room. The conservation of resources and staff time as a result of the communication between Hotellobot Software, Hotellobot Robot Hardware, and staff smart watches will be unprecedented.

Data collected from this unique network will produce invaluable information regarding guest requests, and assist hoteliers in projecting and implementing the most economical direction of employee and resource.

Hotellobot is a multifaceted, unique software and robot hardware, that will provide support to guests, staff, and hoteliers alike. Hotellobot will bring an adroit, previously unchartered dimension to concierge and guest services. Technology in hotel rooms is a step towards a more efficient, cutting-edge business model. The 24 - hour, unlimited nature of Hotellobot’s functionality will transform the accessibility of guest services, as well as eradicate unnecessary calls to reception desks.

Arvato CRM Solutions has been named as a ‘Leader’ in an extensive vendor evaluation report for Digital Customer Experience Services from NelsonHall, the leading business process services and IT services research and analysis firm.

The NelsonHall report evaluates global outsourcing vendors on their ability to deliver customer experience improvements, optimize costs, manage volume and scale, and generate revenues. Arvato CRM Solutions is one of a small number of companies that NelsonHall recognizes as ‘a leader’, based on their overall ability to deliver immediate client benefits and meet future customer service requirements.

NelsonHall identifies cost optimization and customer experience improvements as particular strengths of Arvato CRM Solutions - including offshoring and nearshoring, operation consolidation, improvement in turnaround time through process optimization and automation, increase of customer satisfaction, reduced customer effort, and process improvement. Other highlights include the company’s proprietary conversational AI framework, strong technology and CX innovation partnership network, and mature self-service offering.

Andreas Krohn, CEO at Arvato CRM Solutions, said: “Being identified as a leader by NelsonHall is a testament to our delivery of truly market-leading customer service for many of the world’s best-known brands. It’s our combination of technology, people and deep experience that makes the real difference and means we can deliver great customer service that our clients value, now and in the future.”

Ivan Kotzev, CX Lead Analyst at NelsonHall, said: “Arvato CRM Solutions is well positioned to meet the key current and future client requirements for digital self-service. The company’s NLU capability and proprietary analytics and conversational AI frameworks, as well as domain experience, are fundamental to achieving cost optimization and improving the customer experience.”

The Board of TSB Bank Plc has today announced that after 7 years as CEO, Paul Pester will be stepping down from his position and leaving the company.

Richard Meddings, current Non Executive Chairman of TSB, will take on the role of Executive Chairman with immediate effect in order to enable a full public search to commence for a new CEO.

Whilst there is still work to do to achieve full stability for customers, TSB’s systems and services are much improved since the bank’s IT migration earlier this year. Paul and the Board have therefore agreed that this is the right time for Paul to step down and to appoint a new CEO for TSB.

Commenting on the changes, Richard Meddings said:

"Paul has made an enormous contribution to TSB. Thanks to his passion and commitment, TSB is today one of the UK’s strongest challenger banks, serving over 5 million customers across the UK. On behalf of the TSB Board, I want to thank Paul for everything he has achieved as CEO and pay tribute to the contribution he has made in bringing greater competition to the UK retail banking market.

"Although there is more to do to achieve full stability for customers, the bank’s IT systems and services are much improved since the IT migration. Paul and the Board have therefore agreed that this is the right time to appoint a new CEO for TSB. Our goal is therefore to allow a full search to commence, without any distractions, enabling TSB to build for the future.

"Meanwhile I have been asked by the Board to take on the role of Executive Chairman on an interim basis. Together with the Executive Committee, we have three immediate priorities: to complete the work of putting things right for customers; to enable the bank to achieve full functionality – including the availability of all product services and launch of a leading Business Banking offer; and appointing a CEO for the next chapter of TSB."

Paul Pester said:

"Five years ago, on 9 September 2013, we launched TSB back onto high streets across Britain. I vividly remember standing in our Baker Street branch, waiting to reveal TSB above the door. But it wasn’t just a sign we were revealing – we were revealing a bank with a clear mission to bring more competition to UK banking and ultimately make banking better for all UK consumers.

"Thanks to the fantastic work and commitment of all TSB Partners, we have achieved real success in creating a bank which is truly consumer-focused, attracting customers from the UK’s established banks, and growing TSB’s balance sheet from c.£18bn to c.£31bn today. The last few months have been challenging for everyone at TSB. However, I want to thank all my colleagues across TSB for their dedication and commitment during this period and for their focus on putting things right for TSB customers.

"It has been a privilege to lead TSB through its creation and first five years. I look forward to seeing the next stage of our bank’s history evolve."

London, 03.09.2018: Intelenet® Global Services, a renowned global Business Process Services player today announced that the company has set up a centre in Jordan with the inauguration of its latest global delivery centre. The state-of-the-art centre with a capacity of 200 seats will help the company expand its operations across all sectors and provide low cost Arabic delivery based on emerging client demands.

Intelenet has four centres in the Middle-East catering to clients across travel, logistics, telecom, financial services and public sectors with cost optimal BPS service offerings in English and Arabic. The Jordan centre is a stepping stone which will allow Intelenet to provide hybrid onshore and offshore delivery locations. The centre is in the process of expanding to a 500-seater facility and will be a pivotal centre for driving growth in the GCC region.

Piety Gonsalves, Managing Director – Middle East, Intelenet Global Services said, “Jordan is a strategic low cost nearshore delivery location for us and this centre underscores our intent to grow aggressively in this region leveraging local talent. We see significant opportunities to grow across sectors. With this strategic presence in Amman, our continuous endeavour is towards operational excellence and delivering customer satisfaction by providing digital transformation based new age innovations.”

Intelenet® has a global footprint with presence in eight countries with a combined strength of 40+ service centres and 55,000 employees to meet the growing requirements of businesses from various corners of the world in multiple languages.