Industry news

Senior policy officer Rohan Silva has called for a £10 billion reduction of public sector IT budget.

The recommendation came during a treasury office briefing and would allow according to Silva, for increased savings, while still providing for improved public sector IT services.

The savings would be achieved through improvements in IT contracts, increased flexibility and developments in technology.

“People are talking about very big figures and potential savings in the Welfare budget, but it’s my view that over time we can take just as much out of IT. I think we can take £10 billion out of public sector IT spending in the years ahead, without any change in the experience for the citizen,” said Silva.

China based phone giant Huawei Technologies expects to see rising profits in southern and eastern Africa as demand in regions are set to grow.

Growth of up to 30 percent is expected to occur over the next three years within certain regions as demand for mobile devices including smart phones jumps.

At present mobile market penetration remains very low with less than 5 in 100 Africans holding a mobile subscription.

Huawei is also expecting to receive increased demand from private enterprises and the public sector as it focuses on developing enterprise level services in the region.

Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service (CFRS) have deployed a PSN to provide collaboration services between the service and other national fire and rescue departments.

The PSN will provide networking and data transfer services, with a 60 times increase in transfer speed of data from the old service and will allow the service to procure services through the public sector Cloud Store programme.

The network which was built to public sector standards, was created and will be supported by Updata.

The public sector will seek to use more private services according to the chief executive of Capita over the next two years.

Departments that are likely to make the move towards private services over the next two years are likely to include the ministries of defence, justice along with local authorities according to Paul Pindar, the CEO of Capita.

Pindar, said: “One of the clear themes that came through [from a meeting with the Cabinet Office] was that we're now in the second half of the football match and the activity needs to kick off again.”

The outsourcing giant expects growth of 3 percent during 2012 with increasing growth generated by public sector business despite negative headlines surrounding projects run by G4S and CSC.

Britvic and AG Barr, owners of such brands including Robinsons and Irn-Bru, are set to merge in a deal worth £1.4 billion.

The merger would create a dominant drinks company within the European market, with ownership split between Britvic with 63 percent and AG Barr owning the remaining 37 percent.

The merger between the two companies would see reductions in the combined work force of between 8 and 12 percent.

Accenture has announced it is expanding its global network of Innovation Centres for SAP® solutions with the opening of a new centre in Centurion, South Africa. Focused on accelerating the development, delivery and commercialisation of business solutions based on SAP technologies, the centre will help clients increase speed to market, enhance flexibility, and improve business performance.

The Accenture Innovation Centres for SAP solutions bring together Accenture's functional and industry expertise with the latest SAP technologies, including the SAP HANA® platform and mobility and cloud solutions. Supported by teams of professionals from Accenture and SAP, the centres provide clients with process-specific business solutions, thought leadership around existing and emerging SAP solution-based technology, and the industrialisation of the resulting solution, content and delivery methods.

In particular, the Accenture Innovation Centre for SAP solutions in Centurion is focused on innovating new solutions for growth industries, such as telecommunications, utilities, mining, banking, public sector, automotive, consumer goods and retail.

"The new Accenture Innovation Centre for SAP solutions will help our clients in South Africa and the Sub-Saharan Africa region derive even greater value from their investments in SAP solutions and accelerate business results in the highly competitive market environment," said Willie Schoeman, managing director of Technology, Accenture Southern Africa.

Executives from some of the world's most-recognised firms have been grilled by MPs on the issue of tax avoidance.

The head of Google UK and top managers from Starbucks and Amazon appeared before the Public Accounts Committee.

Starbucks admitted the Dutch government had granted a special tax deal on its European headquarters, which receives royalty payments from its UK business.

Amazon and Google also confirmed they used favourable European tax jurisdictions for their UK businesses.

Amazon's sales are handled out of Luxembourg, while Google's advertising space is sold by a team in the Republic of Ireland, the executives confirmed.

Genpact Limited, a global leader in business process management and technology services, is recognized as a “Leader” in the Global Banking Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Market Report published annually by the global consulting and research firm Everest Group.

Everest Group conducts an annual study across global banking BPO service providers to analyze the changing dynamics of the BPO landscape and assess service providers across several key dimensions. As part of Everest Group’s 2011 Global Banking Research, 12 banking BPO service providers globally were assessed on the firm’s Performance, Experience, Ability, Knowledge (PEAK) Matrix, a proprietary framework that provides an objective, data-driven, and comparative assessment of providers based on their absolute market success and delivery capability. Everest Group identified Genpact as one of the “Banking BPO Leaders” for 2012 based on its market success and delivery capability.

“Genpact’s global banking BPO business has emerged as a ‘Leader’ in our research due to its ability to deliver a broad set of capabilities and capitalize on market opportunities,” said Rajesh Ranjan, vice president, Everest Group. “Genpact’s focus on process excellence, strategic use of technology, balanced shoring approach and investment in domain capabilities should help Genpact maintain its success in the industry.”

Cloud, connectivity and hosting provider, Pulsant, is supporting Pelamis Wave Power by helping to manage, back-up and store data vital to the development of its world-leading wave energy technology.

With operations in Edinburgh and Orkney supporting two Pelamis wave machines being demonstrated at the European Marine Energy Centre off the coast of Orkney, Pelamis Wave Power uses a remote control and monitoring system in order to assess live machine performance and adapt control algorithms to maximise electricity generation.

Protecting this critical information presents numerous challenges, including connecting and moving high volumes of data from isolated locations with restricted infrastructure and bandwidth.

To overcome this, Pulsant has provided a managed off-site back-up solution that addresses the different needs and constraints for the protection of critical data at each of the Pelamis offices. This hybrid solution includes daily backup of servers, cloud based data processing and live mirroring - backup of proprietary business systems. Pulsant provided the necessary expertise and support at each stage to deliver the project from design to rollout.

Outsourcer's bid pipeline stands at 4 bln stg

Capita PLC said it is on track to achieve 3 percent organic growth for the year as demand for its outsourcing services remained buoyant in Britain.

The FTSE-100 group, which runs contracts from civil service training schemes to highway maintenance, said in a trading statement on Tuesday it anticipates further strong progress into 2013.

Despite recent high-profile setbacks to the industry, including the G4S London Olympics debacle and a government U-turn on prison outsourcing earlier in November, Capita says that it was continuing to secure public sector contracts, with significant activity in particular from the justice and defence ministries.