Industry news

Accenture has won a new five-year contract with Unilever to provide human resources business process outsourcing services that benefit more than 130,000 Unilever employees in over 100 countries and introduce a series of service improvements focused on enhancing the user experience. Financial terms of the contract were not disclosed.

Under the terms of the contract, Accenture will work with Unilever to continue to improve the quality and effectiveness of its HR services. The scope of the contract includes recruitment, reward and core HR administration, and learning services covering content sourcing and development, program planning and delivery, learning system hosting, payroll administration, and management and administrative services.

As part of the renewed contract, Accenture will closely align the services it delivers with Unilever’s Talent Agenda. With the introduction of a number of innovations, the services Accenture provides will focus on delivering business-relevant results in line with Unilever’s key business priorities. The program will drive greater efficiencies and an improved user experience. The enhanced contract will include a number of new elements.

Additionally, Accenture will introduce a more proactive recruiting approach, including the expanded use of social media. Proactive sourcing tools will support more effective, forecasting-led recruiting methods and will result in a broader, more appropriate candidate pool for Unilever.

Oracle has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Eloqua, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based marketing automation and revenue performance management software for $23.50 per share or approximately $871 million, net of Eloqua’s cash.

Eloqua’s modern marketing cloud delivers best-in-class capabilities to ensure every component of marketing works harder and more efficiently to drive revenue.

The combination of Oracle and Eloqua is expected to create a comprehensive Customer Experience Cloud offering to help companies transform the way they market, sell, support and serve their customers. The combined offering is expected to enable organizations to provide a highly personalized and unified experience across channels, create brand loyalty through social and online interactions, grow revenue by driving more qualified leads to sales teams, and provide superior service at every touchpoint.

The Board of Directors of Eloqua has unanimously approved the transaction. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2013, subject to Eloqua stockholder approval, certain regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

CloudApps, the multi-award winning provider of sustainability performance management software, has announced global running footwear and apparel company Brooks Sports, as its latest customer.

Brooks will use CloudApps to streamline and automate its data collection and to help meet its overall corporate responsibility goals.

Brooks Sports’ initial roll out of CloudApps’ sustainability suite will provide deep analytics into its environmental and social performance, capturing a myriad of data across its own operations and its supply chain. Data ranging from electricity and water consumption at its offices, to product transportation and human rights data in its supply chain will leave Brooks better placed to understand and analyze its impacts and to subsequently take appropriate efforts to improve its performance.

A report has revealed that nearly 70 percent of trusts will set infrastructure development as their main IT priority in 2013.

The report from EHI Intelligence revealed plans for increased spending despite the increasing finical constraints being placed on the NHS.

Only six percent of trusts surveyed expect to have to carry out drastic IT budget reductions of more than 20 percent.

UK copyright law will be reformed under new plans unveiled by Business Secretary Vince Cable.

The announcement comes after a review of intellectual property legislation earlier in 2012. The new plans will allow copyrighted works to be used in certain cases without the permission of owners.

Mr Cable said: ““Making the intellectual property framework fit for the 21st century is not only common sense but good business sense. Bringing the law into line with ordinary people’s reasonable expectations will boost respect for copyright, on which our creative industries rely”.

Oracle is to purchase Eloqua in a deal worth $871 million, the move will allow the IT giant to extend services to include Eloqua’s marketing automation software.

The deal comes after the acquisition of RightNow and Virtue as Oracle seeks to compete in the delivery of cloud services.

The deal has been approved by Eloqua’s board with expectations of the deals finalisation in early 2013.

The government has cancelled three major sector procurement framework (GPS) projects in a bid to increase competition and attract increased numbers of SMEs.

The announcement came after a review of all GPS projects. GPS’ have received criticism in the past for being wasteful, with suppliers forced to provide extensive bids in order to be entered into the awards process which had reduced the overall supplier pool.

Bill Crothers, Government Chief Procurement Officer, commented that: Frameworks which are already operating effectively and delivering significant change such as the Public Services Network and G-Cloud provide a model for success and will continue.”

Public bodies will be allowed to provide funding for broadband development projects within urban locations under new EU rules.

The rules will allow state funding to be provided for the creation of fibre networks and other broadband delivery infrastructure.

The funding will be made to adhere to strict competition guidelines and public sector investment will only be allowed if substantial improvements can be expected.

Oracle has posted a sales increase of 3 percent for the second quarter of 2012 compared to the same time in the year before.

The increase in sales to £5.6 billion has been limited however by poor performance from hardware sales which dropped by 23 percent.

New growth can be expected with increase cloud uptake as Oracle releases a new database in 2013, with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison saying that this can be expected to drive growth “for the next several years,"

Oracle president, Mark Hurd, said: “Q2 performance was strong and broad-based, as all geographies reported double-digit revenue growth in new software license and cloud subscriptions.

Essex County Council will create a public service next generation network worth £81 million.

The network will be managed by the Daisy Group and Updata Infrastructure as joint venture group called Daisy Updata Communications.

Daisy Updata Communications will be involved in developing the network infrastructure over a 10 year period, established connectivity between public service bodies including councils, schools emergency services.

CIO at Essex County Council, David Wilde said: “We are absolutely committed to sharing services and collaborating with our partners and neighbours, and clearly the most cost effective way of doing that is across a shared infrastructure."