Industry news

With increasingly more companies realising the potential benefits of software applications within business, CRM is becoming a vital part of the corporate armoury.

With CRM evolving rapidly to meet the requirements of today’s mobile workforce, we are witnessing a real coming of age for this business-critical technology. Organisations – regardless of size - are increasingly realising the value that software can bring to their business and realising the benefits of using CRM to take a highly customer centric approach. Indeed, the availability of robust CRM technologies mean that businesses are beginning to treat CRM as far more than a tool to simply aid the sales force, but as a core component in maximising profitability, revenue and customer satisfaction.

Advances in CRM software means it is far easier to implement CRM across a business than it was a few years ago. CRM solutions can now be integrated seamlessly with an organisation’s existing IT infrastructure, accessed on a broad range of mobile devices and organisations can even aggregate the customer and prospect information held in their database against any social media site they choose. Investing in CRM provides enterprise-wide access to vital customer information—anytime, anywhere—so that businesses can manage their operations with an integrated approach across customer care, marketing and representatives in the field. The benefits of this are irrefutable.

Utilising software that helps sales teams to identify emerging buying trends; detect unattended or dissatisfied customers and gauge customer preferences will ensure that cross-selling opportunities are identified more rapidly, and that promotional offers and email marketing campaigns are better targeted. CRM acts as the glue that brings marketing and customer service together; enabling those in the field, marketers and management to harness the rich insights that are available within their business.

London plays host to the yearly EOA awards tonight celebrating the best in European outsourcing, from new innovation to top upcoming destinations.

This year’s awards moves from Madrid to London, with the venue located at The London Law Society. Attendees include multiple FTSE 100 companies, with global firms including the likes of IBM, Fujitsu, and Centrica.

Combined with the NOA’s 25th Anniversary & Conference on the 28th June, the EOA Awards is a must attend networking event for all those involved in European outsourcing.

Please stay on tuned on sourcingfocus.com twitter - for live updates this evening.

Bloomberg has announced the creation of a real-time global analytics and research platform called Bloomberg industries, designed to deliver real-time data to users.

The platform will be updated by over 100 research professional, providing analysis on over 100 industries worldwide.

Dan Doctoroff, Bloomberg CEO and president, commented: “Corporate management and investment professionals need accurate, timely and thoughtful insights to make the right decisions”.

Cloud- based enterprise social networking software Yammer has been purchased by Microsoft for £768 million.

Yammer will be integrated into part of Microsoft’s Office Division and will be continued to be managed by its CEO David Sacks.

Yammer provides social network like capabilities such as those of Facebook and Twitter, adapted for use within the workplace. Larry Cannell, a Gartner analyst, commented on the deal: "This immediately makes Microsoft a stronger competitor in the enterprise social market,"

The multinational IT service firm Atos has had its contract renewed and extended by the Welsh Government. Atos has been working with the Welsh government since 1998 and the extended contract will see services continue until 2019.

The new 5 year contract, worth £70 million will see the company continue build on the governments ICT strategy providing IT services in a ‘multi source’ environment and liaising with a variety of ICT providers.

Welsh Government permanent secretary Dame Gillian Morgan said: "We believe this option gives us the value, service and flexibility we were looking for."

Transport for London is looking to encourage potential suppliers to compete for contracts with the company as it considers moving away from Capita after the expiry of the current contract to provide network information services in 2013.

Tfl has issued a Prior Information Notice in order to give potential suppliers the opportunity to provide a competitive proposal to the current Capita system which currently is used to relay incidents and provide solutions.

The Capita system is described as providing an “early visibility and the ability to share information between various bodies, such as the British Transport Police, and other emergency services. It allows for prompt and quick decisions to be made around major incidents between key stakeholders”

Quest Software, who specialises in IT management software, has received an increased offer from Dell, according to a unnamed source speaking to Reuters.

Currently a unnamed group, named as Dell by the source, and a group led by Insight Venture Partners are competing for the acquisition of Quest.

Dell has reportedly increased its offer to $27.50 per share as the computer giant seeks to increase its portfolio of companies and turn away from personal computers with the growth of mobile devices.

CA technologies are helping fix the issue affecting Natwest systems, the news comes as The Register reports that the outage affecting Natwest was due to a failure stemming from batch scheduling software CA 7 Workload Automation.

The Guardian also reported last Friday that the problem had occurred because of a”botched” upgrade to the CA7 scheduling suite.

CA technologies stated that they “do not comment on customer confidential issues.”

The business support services industry is set for a strong year according to the latest Smart Money study from business and financial adviser Grant Thornton UK LLP. The total value of investment deals for the sector is already on target to beat that of 2011, with 16 deals worth £1.7 billion in the first quarter, compared to 86 deals worth £3.1 billion in total during 2011 and 83% of those polled expecting private equity investment in the sector to increase in the next 12 months.

In addition respondents were markedly optimistic about the exit market for the second half of 2012 with a large majority of respondents (63%) seeing improvement and 36% reporting that multiples of 7x EBITDA or more was the norm compared to just 5% 12 months ago.

“The results of this year’s Smart Money study for the support services industry are encouraging. As the UK looks at how to stimulate growth, the business support services sector is attracting investment and we’re seeing more transactions at a higher value,” explains David Ascott, partner, corporate finance, Grant Thornton. “While the sector is growing, the value drivers are still the same, with buy-and-build and recurring revenue streams key areas which investors are focusing on. The search for growth is also leading to investment in support service firms in areas facing legal and regulatory change.”

Business process outsourcing is cited as the most attractive support service subsector for investment at 83%; followed by operational support and consulting and advisory firms, both at 48% each and facilities management at 40%.

Public sector reforms are also creating opportunities for support services companies. According to the study, public sector bodies are partnering with support services firms to deliver non-core operations, so that they can concentrate on delivering high quality, frontline public services. Based on respondents’ feedback, 43% identified health and 30% identified central government as the most attractive areas for investment in the public sector.

"Whilst there are increased opportunities in the sector due to an opening up of the market and increased investor appetite our survey also indicates a note of caution regarding investments over the next year. Nearly half of those polled said that the wider financing environment will be the biggest obstacle to a growth in private equity investment, and that regulatory change and budgetary pressures also present obstacles to investment. While private equity firms recognise that the year ahead will present difficulties, nearly all of those in the study have already adapted their investment strategies to combat this, largely by focusing on improving existing assets, or looking for buy-and-build opportunities," concluded Ascott.

sourcingfocus.com interview with Pat Geary, chief marketing officer at Blue Prism.

Can you define your business and your specialities?

Blue Prism’s unique software platform enables business operations in service industries and Business Process Outsourcers (BPO’s) to rapidly automate manual back office processes by creating their own virtual, robotic, workforce. This leads to a significant reduction in cost and waste - whilst improving customer satisfaction.

The “virtual workforce” is built by the operational teams themselves using the "self-service" robotic automation technology from Blue Prism to rapidly build and deploy their own automations through leveraging the presentation layer of existing enterprise applications. Critically, the automations are built by the business but are fully managed within an IT governed framework. Blue Prism technology enables organisations to:

• Automate repetitive, rules based processes rapidly which had previously been un-economic to address

• Deploy robotic automations rapidly to respond to rapidly changing business demands and manage seasonal peaks and troughs in workloads

• Use existing business operations resources to configure and execute automations without needing IT development or specialist IT skills

• Enhance and extend existing BPMS initiatives into the “long tail” of the process automation opportunity landscape

• Rapidly build, test and deploy new components from existing applications using a simple drag and drop process flowchart interface

• Preserve data integrity by leveraging the existing application presentation layer and underlying application logic with already exists

Based in the UK, Blue Prism currently operates in the Financial Services, Energy, Telco and Public sectors.

How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?

Blue Prism provides an enterprise strength platform for robotic automation, proven in demanding back office operations including RWE npower, Fidelity Investments, 02, Shop Direct, the Co-operative Banking Group, Experian, the NHS and a major UK BPO.

Blue Prism is the first company to address the challenge of creating new processes in a multi-application environment by developing a unique, robust, enterprise strength technology capability through re-purposing the presentation layer of existing enterprise applications as a service. This enables rapid orchestration of existing enterprise assets to support rapid build and deployment of process automations - without impacting underlying technical infrastructure.

Using Blue Prism business processes can be robustly automated 3-5 times faster than traditional approaches with the essential operational support and governance but without needing IT development resources. The technology also saves companies the associated costs of IT integration and application development, improves business process efficiencies and liberates IT teams to focus on other key business challenges.

In your opinion - what are the top 3 outsourcing hot topics / trends at the moment?

1. ‘Impact of Robotic Automation on the BPO market” – What does the next generation BPO look like? It is clear that finding cheaper and cheaper labour to process manual back office processes is not a sustainable model. Does Robotic automation offer a way of delivering new efficiencies and new offerings in the timeframes and operational constraints that BPO’s business models dictate?

2. Repatriation of off-shored processes – the repatriation of business processes back in-house poses a challenge to the outsourcing industry. But repatriating services can be as complex and costly process as outsourcing them – Are there new approaches and technologies that make repatriation commercially and technically viable?

3. Indian labour arbitrage and currency volatility – the combination of rising Indian wages and currency fluctuations may erode the historic cost benefits of this model - posing a risk to the future of the offshore BPO market

What does the future hold for Blue Prism?

Blue Prism’s technology will play a key role in helping BPO vendors benefit from a virtual, ‘robotic’, workforce that can quickly automate manual back office processes. This will save vendor costs, and enhance both service and operational efficiencies – ultimately improving their competitive edge.

The economics of the robotic approach is proving compelling. Programs using this approach have been so successful, that major initiatives are now active across many large organisations.

The big difference is that robotic automation allows the business to independently address issues and it clarifies responsibilities between IT and operations, in a way that is supportive. This means that issues relating to data transportation and large system functionality remain the domain of IT and the manipulation and configuration of existing assets, becomes the domain of the business.