Industry news

Following news that the UK government has mandated open source software, James Passingham, Technical Services Director for independent managed communications provider, Foehn, explains why more organisations are opening their eyes to open source.

This week, the UK government mandated a preference for using open source software for future digital developments. The new Government Service Design Manual, released as a beta version on the 14th of March and effective from April, lays out standards that must be used for all new digital public services. For the first time, the UK government has expressed a formal preference for open source over proprietary software.

Open source solutions are nothing new and have been successfully deployed in more businesses that you might think, including outsourced customer contact centres.

You may or may not be familiar with open source solutions, but they are growing in popularity in the private sector, and most certainly will in the future in the public sector. This is partly because of the attractiveness of decreased costs, but also because the open source approach enables organisations to achieve more with their customer contact centres and other telephony requirements.

Open source is reference to a program where source code is available publicly for use or modification from its original design. Code is created collaboratively where programmers improve the code and share changes. The community is well supported with hundreds of contributors continuously adding hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

Telephony lies at the heart of the customer interface and customer contact centres require solutions that can be tailored exactly to their requirements. The open nature of a platform such as Asterisk enables systems or legacy systems to be integrated, or applications to be created, ensuring that each solution meets a company’s needs.

A good example of a highly successful open source solution is Low Cost Travel Group. The company’s call centre annual revenue rocketed from £2m to £70m in five years and outgrew its original phone system. A new system was needed to cope with complex queuing / routing requirements and demand for actionable intelligence.

The Group considered a range of technologies, including Asterisk. Not only did the Asterisk approach come in at £100k lower than solutions offered by proprietary vendors, it offered a centralised management system guaranteeing cost savings in the long term

The company adopted a centralised Asterisk-based call centre system integrating a sophisticated IVR with dynamic, flexible call routing, queuing and reporting. 200 hard phones were transferred over to 370 soft phone licenses to enable disaster recovery and home-working initiatives, as well as an installation of a redundant system to provide resilience against the unlikely event of another crash or failure.

As a result of the implementation of the solution, call centre conversion increased by 20% and call handling productivity by 25%. Customer retention also increased by 40%.

As with Low Cost Travel Group, a contact centre based on open source software has proven to be the right decision for many businesses that decided to take the ‘leap of faith’.

Many companies have been reluctant to choose open source because of perceived issues such as security, unreliability, and a lack of committed support and maintenance.

Technology by its very nature – be it open source or proprietary – is always at risk. There is no evidence to suggest that open source is less secure; just because the source code is available does not make it more vulnerable. In fact, the opposite is often the case as a wider community of users and developers are constantly improving the product.

The open source community provides access to a wide range of developers and end users allowing for fast identification and resolutions to any security issues.

The traditional criticism of open source software being less reliable is also becoming a myth as we regularly see open source software driving innovation with rock solid reliability and feature richness. The development time to innovate and resolve issues is also often shorter as reliance on a single vendor is negated.

The support and maintenance issue has now all but disappeared because specialist providers of open source solutions do provide very high levels of expertise, guidance and commercial support.

The argument for open source has become more compelling, but whether or not an organisation should outsource its contact centre to an open source specialist will depend on several factors.

If the business has requisite skills and capabilities in house – or can buy them in – then it should definitely review its existing set up to examine whether cost savings can be made and greater functionality added.

Timing is also a consideration.

There may be a tipping point where a business decides to review its customer contact centre set up because of a change in the company’s circumstances. For example, when People’s Postcode Lottery decided to move its operations to a new location in Edinburgh, it prompted a review of its customer contact centre that saw the introduction of an open source solution.

Government publishes preference for open source services

The Importance of Business Continuity

Data preservation and the ability to retrieve data at any time is the foundation of business continuity. The impact that data loss can have on a business is profound, creating the need for effective business continuity planning and the necessary IT solutions to protect data and minimise downtime.

Research from Gartner Inc. has shown that 50 per cent of businesses that suffer disruption from data loss can go out of business within two years.* This can either be due to lost revenue as a result of the disruption or as a result of subsequently failing to meet compliance regulations.

This is particularly concerning as 25 per cent of all PC users suffer from data loss each year.* Even if data is not critical to the business, loss of data including emails, contacts and work in progress can have a big impact on productivity.

The Current Data Protection Landscape

Given the impact that data loss and downtime can have on a business, it is alarming that less than two in ten companies backup all of their data,** according to new research commissioned by Onyx Group.

The research, which took place among IT managers in UK SMEs, highlights a number of ineffective data storage practices that are leaving companies at risk from data loss or theft. Despite the fact that 88 per cent of businesses surveyed have disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place, more than one in four has lost some critical data in the last two years.

As IT is the lifeblood of most businesses today and data protection regulations are increasingly stringent, it is concerning that so many companies are still experiencing data loss and failing to implement the necessary data protection procedures. For example, the research revealed that 23 per cent of companies still record to tape. This is despite the fact that 50 per cent of all tape backups fail to restore.*

In addition, the research has shown that many organisations are not always giving thorough consideration to the security aspects of data backup. For example, 49 per cent of businesses fail to encrypt valuable data. Further to this, the majority of companies (71 per cent) only backup their central or server based data, leaving them potentially vulnerable to some data loss.

Conclusion

There is a clear need for companies to rethink their data protection strategies and to take advantage of more sophisticated methods of securing data such as online backup into secure data centres. Equally as important is the need to plan for the unexpected such as severe weather conditions that can lead to a workplace being inaccessible. Many companies today make use of workplace recovery centres where work stations can be accessed when needed so that a business can continue to operate as normal.

Best practice data protection systems should allow a company to recover its most critical data first and then use a stepped approach to recover less essential information. Offsite backup to a data centre is more secure than onsite backup, which is typically at greater risk.

References

*Gartner Research

**’Secure online backup comes of age’, Onyx Group.

A move by the government to develop a centralised procurement registration system has been revealed by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude.

The development of the system, which has been awarded to NQC by the Government Procurement Service (GPS), would seek to increase the ease in which suppliers could bid for public sector work.

In having a single procurement registration platform, suppliers would be able to avoid the difficulties of the current system, which requires that suppliers register on several systems at once, in order to tender for public sector contracts, which increased expenses and time, particularly for SMEs.

The NQC developed platform will bring around 80,000 registered suppliers to around the same number of end-users. The platform will debt in April, being employed within the health sector before being moved across to other departments.

Francis Maude said: “it will reduce the time and cost spent tendering for government business – especially important for SMEs – and will improve how we share analysis of supplier financial information across government.”

UK government to force Whitehall suppliers to reveal UK tax payments

Indian outsourcing giant Infosys has been awarded a five year IT services contract with car manufacturer BMW.

The contract included infrastructure maintenance, support and operation, covering web services, CMSs and overall IT systems.

In order to deliver the contract, Infosys are creating a new delivery centre in Munich, in proximity to BMW’s headquarters, as part of a global framework management service.

For the Indian outsourcer the expansion into Germany fits well with the organisations goal to increase its European market share.

Infosys has recently increased its European capabilities in the end of 2012, with the multi-million acquisition of Swiss based SAP development consultancy Lodestone.

BMW set to invest £250 million in UK factories

The government has announced a preference for opens source software in the new Government Service Design Manual, designed to standardise government service approaches.

The manual released on the 14th March detailed how open source software should be used: “in preference to proprietary or closed source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, web servers, databases and programming languages.”

The manuals promotion of open source services isthe first time that the government has stated such a preference for open source services over the commonly employed licenced services of the past.

By promoting a move to employ open source services and software, at time where such services are able to compete effectively with licenced alternatives, the government seeks to generate significant costs savings and increase agility and ease of use, while avoiding obstacles posed by proprietary product licences and T&C.

Open source cloud services see slow uptake

Sitel has been recognised for innovation with its UK branch being shortlisted for 3 awards in the European Outsourcing Awards 2013.

The global contact centre giant was shortlisted in categories including: Outsourcing Service Provider of the Year’, ‘Offshore Destination of the Year (Serbia)’ and ‘Outsourcing Works’ in conjunction with John Lewis.

Joe Doyle, Marketing Director of Sitel UK, comments; “We are delighted to have our efforts in delivering innovative outsourcing solutions recognised by industry experts. To be shortlisted in one category is a great achievement, but to have been shortlisted in three is amazing and reflects the hard work of the team over the last year.”

Sitel UK having now been shortlisted to win join a select range of companies, with the finalists finding out if they secured the prestigious awards at the upcoming ceremony in Amsterdam on April 25th.

European Outsourcing Association Awards Winners Announced

Service provider Phoenix has secured a five-year contract to provide IT infrastructure services to waste management firm Biffa.

The contract will see Biffa migrate core services and data to Phoenix operated scalable data centres, in turn Phoenix will allow Biffa access to online services through a cloud infrastructure, including backup of core-services, and the provision of 24/7 support services.

The contract came after Biffa experienced success with the employment of Phoenix’s contact centre service during the London Olympic Games to meet increased demand.

The contract comes as Biffa invests in modernisation projects, having signed a multi-million contract earlier in the month to consolidate and unify its communication services.

Welcome Break award Phoenix IT services contract

Cornwall Council has awarded a £14m outsourcing deal to BT, which is set to be finalised next week, after some minor changes.

Circa 300 staff will TUPE from the council to the joint venture with BT.

BT will deliver savings of £17.6m over a 10-year contract, and will create 510 new jobs in Cornwall.

Council leader Jim Currie said: “This proposal has been subject to a great deal of discussion and the contract has been thoroughly examined. As a result, all the partners are confident that the offer can be delivered, and we all now need to work together to achieve this."

The National Outsourcing Association has today announced the results of its leadership elections – and 8 new people will take seats on the new strategic council, with a range of new positions accounting for the prevalence of outsourcing in all vertical sectors. Incumbent board members will continue in similar roles to their previous positions within the NOA. The core objective of the new council will be to help the NOA further its work in developing the outsourcing profession through the proliferation of standards and qualifications. The first meeting of the council is on April 22nd 2013.

Inaugurated at the first meeting of the NOA council on April 22nd 2013 will be:

• Stephen Hayers, Head of Business Process Outsourcing, Astrazeneca

• Kevin Devoy, Head of Procurement (outsourcing), Centrica

• James Cuthell, Financial Service Relationship Manager, Everything Everywhere

• Orla Keady, Director, IT Sourcing, Deloitte

• Jim Reed, Director of Procurement, University of Nottingham

• Mark Devonshire, Head of Business Development, Capgemini

• Derek Parlour, Head of Commercial, National Rail Enquiries

• Sue Tompkins, Director, EQ Partnering

NOA Communications Director Kerry Hallard said: “We are delighted to welcome the incoming council members, who bring a wealth of sector-specific experience that reflects the ever-broadening outsourcing marketplace. By offering the only university-accredited qualifications in outsourcing, developing industry standards in collaboration and launching a new awards ceremony to recognise individuals who make outsourcing work, the NOA is working hard to professionalise the industry, and we are excited to have such a strong strategic council to help us unite the industry and drive it forward.”

After the collapse of 2e2 which provided IT services including data centre hosting facilities for Barnet Council, the public body was looking at the imminent and real proposition of having its websites taken offline, now Capita has taken on the terminated service.

The restored service contract is valued at £72,000 per month, 3 thousand pounds more than 2e2. However the rapid restoration of the service prevents Barnet Council from seeing large parts of its infrastructure disappear.

2e2 which folded into administration has been carved up by competitors, with Logicalis acquiring four of 2e2’s subsidiaries and the Daisy Group acquiring 2e2’s data centre business.

Capita has already emerged as the preferred bidder for a £320 million major BPO deal, which is expected to go ahead after regulatory approval.

Barnet Council confirms £320 million Capita BPO contract