Industry news

Technology research group Gartner have released a survey that demonstrates that Customer relationship management (CRM) software has become a top priority for CIOs. The survey placed CRM software as the eighth most important consideration for CIOs in 2012.

CRM software has had greater focus placed on its application and that of social media, as customer experience becomes a key consideration in times of shrinking IT budgets and increased competition.

Gartner vice-president Ed Thompson commented that "In 2012, CRM executives are faced with the challenge of taking ‘social' more seriously – not as ‘just another channel'. but as a whole new way of doing business."

David Brennan, chief executive at the pharmaceutical company announced his resignation hours before a shareholder meeting. AstraZeneca has been hit by losses from a limited pipeline of new drugs on the market after poor drug trials and heavy competition from rival firms.

First-quarter profits dropped 40 percent, well under market expectation in addition to future negative predictions on AstraZeneca’s profits for the year.

Mr Brennan said: "I have decided that now is the right time to step down and allow a new leader to take the reins."

The recruitment services firm, Alexander Mann Solutions (AMS), has transferred its IT services onto a Cloud based platform in order to cut costs by 25 percent.

The recruitment firm employed Moldavian and Romanian based Endava to provide a cost reducing programme, while focusing on increasing the quality of services provided, which led to the Eastern European firm promoting Cloud based hosting.

John Wainwright, head of global IT at AMS, said: "We now receive service levels that deliver over 80% service call resolution at first point of support."

The government has announced £70 billion in potential public sector contracts for the next five years. The contracts cover multiple sectors including property, medical, emergency services and ICT with a potential £1.7 billion in contracts.

In publishing the potential contracts, the Government hopes to avoid investment gaps while promoting competitive bidding for new business. The G-Cloud is expected to receive £250 million of the potential investment.

Vince Cable, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, said today: "Frankly, we’ve been too short-term in how we’ve done procurement in the past. Our key competitors in Europe already see procurement as an integral part of a proper industrial strategy

Cloud computing firm, Salesforce, has unveiled the Government Cloud for the US. The company hope that the new software will accelerate government’s transformation for the social era.

The Government Cloud will include a dedicated, multi-tenant instance of Salesforce’s cloud infrastructure that will allow U.S. federal, state, and local agencies to rapidly deploy the latest social and mobile technologies in compliance with US legislation. The Government Cloud also includes AppExchange for Government, a new app marketplace for the public sector where government agencies can find, try and deploy cloud apps that meet their needs.

Additionally, the Government Cloud includes the Salesforce Government Partner Accelerator Program, which will train an army of 1,000 integrators by the end of 2012 to rapidly transform government IT with Salesforce.

“The bureaucracy of legacy government IT is preventing agencies from embracing innovative technologies that deliver immediate value,” said Vivek Kundra, executive vice president, emerging markets, salesforce.com. “We must end the era where government spends millions of dollars and waits years for IT projects that never work. Now, salesforce.com offers a solution the government needs to break down barriers to innovation and eliminate wasteful IT spending.”

Yorkshire and Clydesdale banks have been hit by an IT glitch which has left customers unable to withdraw cash or make payments. IT is the fifth time in two months that the bank’s debit cards have been affected.

A spokesperson for the banks said: “Some customer card transactions were affected by an intermittent service issue earlier this morning. This was caused by a hardware issue at our supplier First Data, which is currently being investigated. Normal service was resumed by 10am. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

The problems started in early March when the banks transferred systems operations to First Data. However, the banks have stated that not all the problems were related to the outsourcer.

Software contributed nearly 90% of SAP’s revenue growth for the first quarter of 2012. The German application vendor’s revenue was up 11% from the respective period in 2011.

“We reported our ninth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth in non-IFRS software and software-related service revenue, with a strong contribution from SuccessFactors to our cloud business,” said Werner Brandt, CFO of SAP. “Free cash flow was very strong in the first quarter, increasing by 35% to €2 billion. This enabled us to return to positive net liquidity faster than expected.”

“We see strong momentum for our flagship in-memory platform SAP HANA, our cloud and mobile solutions, and our core applications and analytics products,” said Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe, Co-CEOs, SAP. “Customers are embracing our high speed of innovation and the ability to orchestrate solutions across our entire portfolio. SAP continues to help companies run like never before – helping to solve fundamental business challenges with unmatched industry expertise. We’re confident that we’ll deliver on our business outlook for Q2 and the full year.”

O2 today announced the launch of its Future Fund. The scheme will support ICT teams within local authorities by enabling them to bring to life ideas and projects where they believe technology innovation could drive positive change in surrounding communities or the ways in which its employees work. Successful local authorities applying for the scheme will be awarded access to a combination of O2 consultancy time, services and technology to help them turn their project ideas from a vision to a practical reality.

The Future Fund will formally open its doors for applications on 25 April 2012 and is comprised of three grant funding packages up to the value of £125,000, £75,000 and £50,000.

Neil Prior, head of local government for O2 commented, “Throughout our consultation we discovered a real passion to embrace technology and what it could deliver. This extended from chief executives to council members. ICT really does have the ability to transform local government, at O2 we want to ensure that in difficult times we step up and help to provide some of the expertise and technology that can help to drive that change and act as an example for others.”

SAP AG today announced that it will work closely with Citi and The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) to co-innovate a cloud-based services platform. The highly interoperable, multi-bank platform aims to seamlessly integrate banks with their corporate customers.

A combination of SAP's deep expertise in enterprise resource planning (ERP), treasury management software and new cloud services technologies is driving the solution development. Together with the industry expertise and global networks of Citi and RBS, SAP aims to deliver a new, innovative solution to the corporate banking marketplace.

"SAP has prided itself in customer-centric innovation, in this case creative innovations in banking that can increase the velocity of information flow between banks and their corporate customers," said Sanjay Poonen, president, Global Solutions, SAP. "Integrating banks with corporate ERP and treasury systems has always been an expensive proposition for banks and corporations alike. Furthering SAP's commitment to the cloud, the banking industry and our many thousands of corporate customers, this solution will dramatically ease corporate banking. This will allow corporate customers to seamlessly extend their ERP and treasury systems and interface with multiple banks."

Business analytics (BA) and business intelligence (BI) is to become an increasing trend throughout 2012. With the current economic climate and the news that the UK is expected to stay in double dip until June at the earliest; the use of BI and BA has become attractive in order to identify cost savings and project progress.

The recent worldwide Gartner CIO survey, compiled from 2,335 CIOs, ranks analytics and business technology as the number one technology for 2012 as CIOs are combining analytics with other technologies to create new capabilities. Savvy CIOs are combining analytics with supply chain for process management and improvement, analytics with memory for field sales and operations, and analytics with social for customer engagement and acquisition.

The NOA Masterclass on Business Analytics for More Profitable Decisions highlighted how organisations are deploying and using analytics and business intelligence to help strengthen the customer experience, streamline processes and ultimately bring in more business.

Toby Crick, partner at Bristows legal firm, detailed why contracts fall through and why business analytics should be employed to inform negotiations. Using research provided by the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management (IACMM), Mr Crick demonstrated that the bottom four areas that were focused on in negotiations included communication and access to information.

The survey also recorded what users wished they had done in hindsight during negotiations, ranking high on the list were drafting the SLAs to better reflect what they actually wanted, and seek to ensure that they avoided an adversarial relationship.

Toby pointed out that the top reasons for disputes and regrets in hindsight over negotiations, could have been resolved by placing more focus on communication and access to information, areas traditionally placed near bottom in negotiations.

Toby also stated that BA needs to be employed in order to effectively drive value and mitigate risks. BA can be further used to facilitate innovation and that even in high pressure deals, it is important that an awareness of the evidence when contracting will provide better results.

Greg Swimer, Vice-President IT for Business Intelligence at Unilever, referred to research from MIT that showed that companies who employed analytical data outperformed those that did not. Mr Swimmer said that Unilever were now employing BA at very high speeds and that analytics data was transmitted at an hourly rate rather than the recent bi-monthly standard.

Unilever shared BA within departments through increased technology, the company also used BA to recognise and categorise the technological infrastructure and landscape of different regions, in order to avoid implementing a strategy across areas e.g. USA and India when the digital technology available in these areas is very different.

One of the main stumbling blocks people experience with business intelligence and analytics is defining precisely what information they want to extract from the data. As Paul Raine, Head of Fault Management at TalkTalk, pointed out, it is all too easy to be data rich and information poor. He advocated a tiered approach to analytics, and stressed the importance of getting the basics right.

Once the core aims have been identified it is crucial that the correct approach to the analytics process is taken. If the metrics that already exist cannot produce a valid analysis that serves the desired purpose, then create them; custom build the intelligence and analytics, ensure that the basics are covered and the results will be invaluable.

The importance of covering the basics was also touched on by Peter Setterfield, Operations & Business Manager of TV Licensing for the BBC. His example of data from their call centres perfectly highlighted the necessity of quality data, not all of the operators were logging the reason behind the call, so it appeared from the data that 20% of people calling had just rung up for a quick chat.

Once that issue had been resolved, the analytics brought another problem to light; after hearing the pre-recorded message for 31 seconds almost all callers hung up. The cause was so obvious (callers were asked for an identification number, and those that didn’t have one, or have it to hand, hung up) but had only been picked up on once the analytics put the data into a graph.

The successful use of analytics led to many tweaks and changes, which in turn led to the lowest number of helpline calls ever. Not only had analytics resolved the issues experienced by customers when calling the helpline, but they had eradicated the original problem. The motivation for using analytics is undeniable: as a result of using business intelligence and analytics the BBC will save £200m (£450m if inflation is taken into account) over the next 8 years.

So what is the future of BI and BA?

Subhash Gaitonde, Programme Director from MindTree's Data & Analytics Solutions (DAS) practice, believes that “going forward business units will control major portion of the BI+A budgets and hence decision/business value offerings approaches will become necessary and decision making will be more business-centric rather than tool-centric.”