Industry news

HP has confirmed plans to reduce its workforce by 27,000 which would amount to eight percent of the companies staff by 2014 in order to make savings of £1.9 billion.

The move will come as part of long term restructuring and cost cutting by the company, which began at the end of October. The cuts will come in the form of both retirement offers and redundancies.

The move comes as HP announce a reduction of the company’s net income by 31 percent in the third quarter from the same time last year.

De Vere had the challenge of trying to join two separate Wide Area Network (WAN) services using an interconnect which was proving costly and inefficient. They chose Claranet to design a WAN that would connect 60 locations to a single platform.

The aquisition and merge of Initial Style Conferences Ltd and De Vere Group plc, meant that both companies had seperate WAN providers, which was not practical or cost effective. With the two separate WAN contracts coming to an end almost simultaneously, De Vere began planning for a new networking solution that would unify the Group and provide a higher performing and more reliable platform.

Jo Stanford, De Vere Group IT Director, said: "We invited Claranet to pitch, but were unsure how they would compare to some of the larger players. Yet, without a doubt, they gave us the most confidence, and proved that they had the right team in place to deliver a better performing WAN that would unify our business. Thanks to the strength of their relations, expertise and experience, Claranet pulled the rabbit out of the hat – more than once – to make sure our WAN was delivered smoothly and on time."

BAE Systems has secured a contract worth £1.6 billion to provide Hawk and Pilatus aircraft to Saudi Arabia.

The move will secure 200 jobs and will see the defence giant supply 55 Pilatus turboprop and 22 Hawk jet trainer aircraft as well as technical support to the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF).

BAE's group managing director, Guy Griffiths, said: "We have a long history in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and, working with Pilatus, we will provide the RSAF with the best training platforms to meet their requirements.”

Analytics is being viewed as an increasingly vital tool in business. Social media has been seen as a new way in which businesses can employ analytics technology. Analytics is being seen as a hugely important tool with many CIOs, rating the employment of analytic technology as one of their new top priorities for 2012.

The use of high quality data to inform high value decision making has become increasingly valued. The employment of analytics can provide cost-savings, efficiency as well as generate insights that can allow for market breakthroughs. The acquisition of social media companies or their employment externally from businesses in order to increase analytics within business has become increasingly prevalent.

This week multinational computer technology company Oracle entered into negotiations to buy social media marketing company Virtue. The acquisition of Virtue would provide the technology giant with the ability to combine Virtue’s services in providing social media campaigns and direct interaction with consumers with Oracle’s own data analytics and management capabilities.

The coupling of social media with advanced analytics will allow customers to accurately gauge how effective their social media campaigns are performing. Companies are increasingly releasing technology designed to incorporate analytics with social media for both internal use as well as selling the technology within a wider market.

Companies spend multi millions on social media campaigns however the implementation of analytics can allow the user to assess the success or failure of the campaign. Social media sites such as Facebook are widely recognised by businesses as being key in engaging and advertising to consumers, without analytics the impact of such services cannot be measured. General Motors pulled a multi-million dollar advertising campaign from Facebook after determining that the success of the campaign did not warrant the revenue expenditure.

The importance of social media in attracting consumers is being increasingly recognised and social media is being increasingly focused on within business strategies. The use of business and consumer analytics with social media provides insights and analysis revenant to business strategies and allows for a flexible approach which adapts to the evidence that analytics gathers. Analytics allows users to identify new areas open to innervation. When the technology is used in conjunction with a social media strategy then innovation can occur on-demand and be adapted to fit the evidence.

Marketing wisdom dictates that to make headway with the consumer, marketers need to be creative. Too often businesses believe that the secret to a successful marketing campaign is witty and hard hitting messaging. But that’s not always the case. It’s fair to say that until recently creative ruled the roost. However, with the birth of big data, marketers now have a new tool at their disposal.

The expanding data footprint left by consumers means that businesses are increasingly aware of individual preferences and reactions – gone are the days of mass market messages which rely solely on creative. By cleverly using customer data to their advantage, marketers are able to target consumers in a way never before possible.

Here are some top tips for making data and creative work for you:

• Use data to drive creative decisions

Marketers should view data as a new tool that can supplement the marketing process of old. The insight gained from data can be used to identify target audiences with a new-found degree of sophistication. In turn this influences the imagery and messaging used in advertising campaigns for competitive advantage and ROI.

• Combine your teams

For many businesses, the structure of the marketing team now includes marketers, creative and data experts. Data is increasingly an important part of the team. From an in-house and agency perspective, the ability to use data in campaigns is fast becoming an area of differentiation which sets them apart from the competition.

• Refine and optimise

Businesses need to recognise how data and creative can work alongside one another to drive ever-smarter and ever-more effective targeted campaigns. A prime example is email and web banners – with the use of data, knowing who to target and where to display or send them not only makes the process more effective, but a whole lot more efficient.

• Target more precisely

Businesses should appreciate that ‘the public’ rarely have homogeneous tastes. Instead they should look to target specific consumers based on their attributes and behaviours – not only is this more effective, but by removing irrelevant marketing it enhances the customer’s experience too.

Last week saw the 2012 Loebner prize take place, the competition in which computers attempt to convince judges that they are human. A few years ago, the results of a competition to demonstrate a machine mimicking a human may have seemed inconsequential to our everyday lives, but today the story is becoming more and more relevant. Increasingly machines use chatbots to interact with users online, or push out discussions on twitter, and the introduction of Apple’s Siri to the consumer market last year made all of this technology much more visible.

For all the marketing fluff, a system that proves it can have a conversation like a human is not really the point. For example, what Siri attempts to do is not to interact, it is to respond and react to simple questions and commands, but as with the “voice recognition” which has been available in high end cars for several years, these are simple tasks which provide little real-world gains in efficiency. But if the principles of natural language interpretation and interactive dialogue could be combined with the ability to trigger the automated execution of tasks, then we would be closer to seeing tangible efficiencies through Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Efficiency is a word that all businesses are drawn to, and if businesses are to use technology to drive such efficiency, what better place to start than the IT department, where use of technology is second nature? If an expert system could be “taught” to act as a virtual service desk, surely that would release the potential of AI to add tangible business value? Imagine if you could deploy virtual service desk staff which are able to think, act and interact independently without human intervention. Contactable 24/7 by a phone, email, Instant Messenger or SMS, they would not only listen and understand what is required, but would have the ability to trigger automated actions, run tests and execute fixes. They would remember everything, creating a vast database of every action undertaken or issue ever resolved, which could be recalled instantly.

The systems behind this principle would not just be having a conversation, but be mimicking the behaviour of a team of service desk engineers. They would continue to learn from every problem they encountered, every request they received and every action they took, and share that knowledge between them. Also, an AI system can handle many tasks at once, can instantly correlate complex information, and can make decisions at lightning speed. But unlike the human engineers they mimic, our virtual service desk staff don’t go sick, don’t forget anything and never come in to work with a hangover. And they never ask for a pay rise!

If this all sounds too far removed from a piece of software pretending it’s a person, it’s not! The principle of a virtual service desk engineer may sound like science fiction, but in reality, the technology isn’t as far away as you might think. Innovative companies have been working on creating this for over a decade. Done right, technology such as this will shake the IT outsourcing industry to its core.

As we read about the strain between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in the UK coalition Government, it is worth remembering that clients and suppliers in an outsourcing arrangement often feel a similar level of stress.

While both parties obviously have different objectives, it could be argued that the basic rationale behind outsourcing should constitute a win-win situation. However, although most arrangements work sufficiently well to keep a business working, it often does not feel like a win-win in reality – particularly from the client’s perspective. High on the worry list is both obtaining and sustaining value for money. Many clients also wrestle with the alignment of their business objectives with that of the suppliers. Given the maturity of the outsourcing market and despite the majority of clients already experiencing their second, third or even fourth generation of contracts, surely it is time for this situation to be improved. But how can clients achieve this in practice?

For a start, from a client’s point-of-view, the word ‘relationship’ itself may not be appropriate in the context of outsourcing. ‘Relationship’ may suggest that this arrangement is a kind of friendship, a potential marriage or a platonic arrangement with dealings on a personal level. Nothing is further from the truth. While I am not advocating an adversarial or disrespectful stance in any way, the key aspect for clients to remember is that outsourcing should be considered strictly a business arrangement.

After all, this is the stance already taken by suppliers. At present, in most outsourcing relationships, the supplier’s skills and capability profile is far more developed in terms of managing its customer and stakeholders, as well as deploying and operating business disciplines and controls, to protect its business interests. Despite consistent advice and plenty of evidence to suggest that they would benefit from adopting a comparable approach to managing their own side of the arrangement, many clients have failed to invest in the appropriate skills to manage their supplier on an equal footing.

There are four key dimensions that need to be considered when building and maintaining an outsourcing business relationship. These dimensions include the:

1. performance metrics that inform the parties

2. business environment that the relationship operates within

3. people who engage to operate the relationship

4. characteristics of the relationship sought.

Everyone involved with outsourcing will recognise the first dimension, performance. The problem is that virtually everyone just concentrates on this aspect alone. Defining and discharging the obligations of the other three dimensions is more challenging. The usual response is, why bother? Analysis has shown that poor or inadequate relationship management can account for as much as 29% of the contract value not being realised.

No matter how it is wrapped up, outsourcing arrangements will always remain an extension of the client’s organisation. The only main difference is that outsourcing is defined by its own commercial arrangements which need to be managed and considered a fundamental part of the relationship. Too often clients treat an outsourcing arrangement as purely a transaction, comparable to buying paper-clips, with nothing further to do having signed a contract. However, they need to consider how outsourcing relationships develop and need careful management over time. Survey data again supports the case for investment in supplier relationship management: 50% of customer/supplier relationships fail. This is surpassed by those clients who take an ad-hoc approach to relationships, who can expect a failure rate of 80%

In today’s economic climate, can any business really afford not to make these achievable improvements?

Data source: United Nations survey 2010

It’s not news to anyone that we live in an increasingly globalised world, particularly when it comes to financial services. We are reminded about this on an almost daily basis, particularly following the onset of the financial crisis with events in Athens for instance, sending regular shockwaves around the globe. An international financial services sector that is so closely intertwined has exacerbated the effects of the crisis, with increasing volatility and competiveness making the market a much tougher place. However, it does open the way to a number of opportunities for firms to overhaul and perfect their business models in order to emerge from the downturn in a prominent position on the global stage. One such opportunity lies in product standardisation, with third parties able to streamline the development process of financial products, allowing organisations to launch them in various markets across different geographies at ease and at a lower expense.

There are two key factors to consider here. The first element to take into account is a standardisation of the global marketplace itself. The explosive growth of a new middle class in emerging countries, particularly in the BRIC nations, means that consumers in the developing world now have a similar purchasing power and financial needs as those in developed markets. If this is the case, then why should those markets not be given a similar options when it comes to financial products? After all we all we all have similar worries and plans and so we want insure our possessions or save for our retirement wherever we are in the world. Such a need highlights the potential that a standardisation of product development holds for firms looking to maximise efficiency and global reach whilst minimising time and cost.

Secondly, regulatory bodies have been quick to recognise the need and potential for a global standardisation of rules and guidelines. Although financial markets will always need regulation tailored to their specific conditions, we have seen a drive by bodies such as the UK’s FSA and international equivalents to homogenise their guidelines as much as possible. The European Banking Authority (EBA), for example, was set up last year to harmonise banking guidelines across the European Union and some US legislation, such as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), has a global jurisdiction. The development of financial products depends heavily on regulatory requirements and a partial standardisation of these paves the way for a more streamlined, unified process. This is where financial services firms can use an outsourcer to their full advantage. A third party will have the expertise and optimum systems in place to standardise the product development process as much as possible, which amounts to big time and money savings for organisations launching products in different markets.

The global marketplace is homogenising with regulation and demand being the principal drivers. By tapping into the international expertise third parties can offer, firms can increase the global impact of their products. Outsourcers are able to optimise the processes behind developing products and can act as a bridgehead to launch them quickly and efficiently on a shared risk model. For good or bad, the financial services sector should embrace the integrated international market as it really is too big an opportunity to miss.

www.opal-uk.com

The European Outsourcing Association (EOA) is delighted to announce the shortlisted entries for the 2012 EOA Awards after a record number of submissions.

Now in its third year, the EOA Awards will take place in London for the first time at The Law Society on the 27th June 2012. It will look to build on the success of the 2011 event by bringing together Europe’s leading outsourcing suppliers, end users and support service providers. The awards take place the day before the National Outsourcing Association’s 25th Anniversary Conference which features highly collaborative breakout sessions, key case studies and ample networking opportunities.

The award categories cover a wide cross-section of outsourcing projects and winning is regarded as a huge accolade in the industry. For the 200+ guests, the awards present a unique opportunity to gain insight into the working models of the most successful projects of 2011/12, thus spreading best practice throughout the European outsourcing community.

Martyn Hart, NOA Chairman, said: “I am very pleased to see that we have a record number of submissions again this year. The sheer variety of the partnerships and submissions show that European outsourcing is a truly dynamic and varied industry. Last year’s event proved to be extremely popular with our members and was hugely successful. This year the EOA Awards precedes the NOA 25th Conference and will offer delegates the fantastic opportunity to network, learn about and celebrate best practice in outsourcing. I look forward to seeing you all there.”

The shortlist is as follows:

BPO Contract of the Year

arvato and Microsoft

Genpact and AstraZeneca Plc

GEP

Infosys BPO

National Rail Enquiries and the National Rail Communication Centre

Sykes Global Services

IT Outsourcing Project of the Year

Centrica - British Gas

HCL and Mecom Group Plc

International Personal Finance and Fujitsu

Luxoft and Hotwire Inc

Mitchells & Butlers Plc and Fujitsu

Ness Technologies and PERFORM

Outsourcing Service Provider of the Year

Ant

BDO

Capgemini BPO Poland

Luxoft

SPi Global

Outsourcing Advisory of the Year

DLA Piper

eClerx Services Limited

Hogan Lovells

Proservartner

Offshoring Destination of the Year

Egypt - ITIDA

Morocco - MEDZ Sourcing

Romania - Computer Generated Solutions and Luxoft

Serbia - Sitel

Slovakia - Ness Technologies

South Africa – Aegis Outsourcing Ltd and CCI BPO

Outsourcing End-user of the Year

Centrica - British Gas

Dutch Public Prosecution Service - submitted by Omnext

Merck

Mitchells & Butlers Plc

National Rail Enquiries

Award for Innovation in Outsourcing

Capgemini BPO Poland

Certus

Customer Care for Philips Consumer Lifestyle Division

Genpact - Smart Enterprise Process

Mitchells & Butlers Plc and Fujitsu

Quint Wellington Redwood

Award for Corporate Social Responsibility

Ant - Ant Kids

Serco - Leicester Works

Serco - Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital

SPi Global

WNS Global Services - WNS Cares Foundation (WCF)

Award for Best Multi-sourcing Project of the Year

Centrica - British Gas

FCC, S.A.

National Grid

Contact: Natalie Milsom +44 (0) 207 292 8689 or nataliem@noa.co.uk

Google has completed its deal with Motorola Mobility for $40 a share, totalling approximately $12.5bn.

The deal marks Google’s biggest acquisition to date. However, for some the deals comes with fears that Google will use Motorola Mobility's hardware to vertically integrate its Google's Android OS product ecosystem (similar to Apple's iPhone and iPad) to the detriment of other hardware suppliers.

Google CEO Larry Page said "I'm happy to announce the deal has closed. Motorola is a great American tech company, with a track record of over 80 years of innovation. It's a great time to be in the mobile business, and I'm confident that the team at Motorola will be creating the next generation of mobile devices that will improve lives for years to come."

Google’s Dennis Woodside, who will take over from Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha, said "Motorola literally invented the entire mobile industry with the first-ever commercial cell phone in 1983. Thirty years later, mobile devices are at the center of the computing revolution. Our aim is simple: to focus Motorola Mobility's remarkable talent on fewer, bigger bets, and create wonderful devices that are used by people around the world."