Industry news

British outsourcing group has said this week it had been selected as recommended supplier to partner Britain's Ministry of Defence in providing recruitment services for the Army and IT services for the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.

The 10-year deal, which is expected to be awarded in mid-March, will come as a boost to the FTSE 100-listed firm which analysts say is under pressure to win new work after only finding growth in recent years through acquisitions.

After five years of working together through a joint subsidiary, CMA CGM Group and IBM have announced a new strategic partnership.

Under the terms of the five-year agreement, IBM will provide industry-specific expertise in new technologies such as cloud computing and analytics, and support CMA CGM's growth by delivering superior quality information technology services that will help CMA CGM significantly reduce costs.

"Innovative technologies from IBM will help CMA CGM to further improve our customer service. This is one of CMA CGM's key competitive strengths," Mr. Saade said. "The creation of this new partnership with a global market leader is strategic for the Group. This partnership will enable us to offer our customers innovative, purpose-designed IT solutions, while improving our cost discipline."

CSC has announced that John Hancock Financial Services, a unit of Manulife Financial Corporation, a leading Canadian-based financial services group serving millions of customers in 21 countries and territories worldwide, has signed a six-year extension to its information technology outsourcing (ITO) agreement with CSC.

Under the agreement valued at $25 million and awarded during the first quarter of fiscal year 2012, CSC will continue to provide applications and infrastructure services for the carrier's U.S. Wealth Management Division in support of the administration of more than one million fixed and variable annuity policies.

"Since 1987, CSC has been John Hancock's strategic partner, supporting our wealth management practice and enabling us to improve efficiency, productivity and profitability while we focus on the essential functions of our business," said Tony Todisco, vice president, John Hancock Annuity Systems. "With the new distributed environment, John Hancock will have greater flexibility and efficiency, and a foundation for the future."

Atos, EMC Corporation and VMware has announced a strategic alliance for open cloud computing. Additionally, Atos plans to create a new company, Canopy, providing a wide range of cloud solutions and services designed to speed the delivery and help customers quickly take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing.

Based on best-of-breed technology from global cloud computing industry leaders EMC and VMware, the new offerings will include an open cloud platform that enables customers to easily and flexibly choose, access and deploy cloud-based services for their enterprise IT needs.

Canopy will provide a market-leading one-stop shop for cloud services, enabling organizations to easily, securely and cost effectively accelerate their move to the cloud. As part of the strategic alliance and in addition to providing the advanced technologies upon which the new Atos cloud solutions and services will be delivered, EMC and VMware also intend to invest alongside Atos to help drive innovation and the successful adoption of Canopy's solutions in the marketplace.

UK defence group BAE Systems has reported a drop in annual sales after defence orders fell back and has warned sales will not grow this year.

Revenues fell 14% to £19.15bn in 2011 while pre-tax profits were £1.46bn, up slightly on 2010's £1.4bn.

The drop in revenue was mainly due to a cut in orders from the US army after it pulled out of Iraq and the delay of an order for jets from Saudi Arabia.

ResponseTek and CallMiner Form Alliance to Provide Integrated Speech Analytics and Customer Experience Management Solution for Contact Centers

Contact Centers Can Obtain a 360-Degree View of Customer Experience by Combining Speech Analytics with Customer Experience Insights and Action Management Tools

ResponseTek, the leader in customer experience management (CEM) software solutions announces a formal agreement with CallMiner, the leader in enterprise speech analytics. The partnership creates a best-in-class combination of capabilities that will drive rapid improvement in quality and customer satisfaction metrics.

ResponseTek has been the leader in call center based customer experience solutions for over 6 years, providing innovative multi-channel survey capabilities, advanced workflow tools, and real-time analysis of large volumes of customer data. The addition of CallMiner’s speech and voice analytics allows ResponseTek to interpret unstructured voice feedback within the ResponseTek Listening Platform™, providing contact centers with a complete understanding of customer experience drivers.

DRIAS, a US company which provides outsourced functions to the insurance sector, has chosen Cardiff Bay for its first European Centre of Excellence.

The investment will initially create 30 jobs at DRIAS Transnat, but will rise to 50 over two years.

The project is being backed with £162,000 from the Welsh Government’s Economic Growth Fund – a £15m initiative to support job creating capital investment projects.

Northgate Managed Services, winner of BETT 2012 ‘ICT Company of the Year over £3million turnover’ award, has been awarded of the £1.3m managed service contract for The Hastings Academy, East Sussex.

Northgate, with its significant portfolio of ‘direct to school’ contracts, will use its proven expertise to help the Academy deliver a technology led environment designed to assist student learning and to raise standards.

The £1.3million 3 year contract will see Northgate working closely with the Academy to develop, design and manage a state-of-the-art ICT infrastructure to promote active learning to the Academy's 900 students.

Outsourcing arrangements often require the transfer of employees’ personal data from the customer to the supplier or vice versa. For example, an outsourcing of payroll functions will involve the transfer of employee data.

Particular issues arise if the data is to be transferred outside of the EU. In addition, notwithstanding that most data protection legislation within the EU derives from the EU Data Protection Directive, there are important differences between countries on how personal data can be processed. The UK rules are currently contained in the Data Protection Act 1998.

In January 2012, the European Commission published its proposal for a new General Data Protection Regulation. The extensive proposals would overhaul this area of law and significantly increase data protection across Europe.

The key proposals are:

• Harmonisation: A single set of rules will apply across Europe.

• Scope extends beyond Europe: The new rules will apply to EU businesses and businesses based outside the EU that process European citizens’ personal data for the sale of goods or services or the monitoring of behaviour.

• Fines: Penalties for non-compliance will be significant, with businesses facing proposed fines of up to €1 million or up to 2% of their annual worldwide turnover (depending on whether the organisation is an ‘enterprise’).

• Explicit consent: The new definition of “consent” will include a requirement that individuals’ consent must be explicitly obtained; it cannot be assumed.

• Notification requirements: Organisations will be required to notify their supervisory authority of a security breach without undue delay, meaning within 24 hours if that is feasible. If not, the notification must be accompanied by a reasoned justification.

• Right to be forgotten: Individuals will be able to ask to be forgotten and have their data deleted unless there is a legitimate ground for keeping it.

• Data protection officers: Organisations with over 250 employees will be required to have a designated data protection officer who will have specific duties in relation to monitoring and advising the organisation.

These changes are probably long overdue – the current law was drafted when recent technological advances could not have been contemplated. However, preparing for the changes and ensuring compliance will place a large administrative and financial burden on businesses with a European presence, including businesses involved in outsourcing.

The next step is for the proposed Regulation to be considered by the European Parliament and Council. It is expected there will be widespread debate on the proposals, and that the Regulation will be amended. Once the Regulation is approved, it is likely to be a further two years before it comes into force.

If the current drafting of the Regulation is approved, there will be a significant change in data protection obligations for both customers and suppliers. Under the current law, only data controllers – organisations that control the purposes and manner for which personal data is processed – are subject to the obligations and restrictions on personal data. Most suppliers are data processors as they process personal data on behalf of the customer (the data controllers). However, the proposal is to impose restrictions and obligations directly on data processors (i.e. suppliers) for the first time.

Currently, it is important for all parties to establish who the data controller is and for the data controller to impose contractual obligations on the other party to ensure compliance with data protection legislation. It is also key to ensure that, if personal data will be moved outside of the EU, this is done in compliance with the strict restrictions on exporting data. Arguably, by extending the scope of data protection legislation to cover data processors and organisations based outside the EU which process EU citizens’ data, these considerations will become less significant for EU-based data controllers (i.e. customers). However, the effect on data processors and international organisations will be much more significant. The more stringent rules will place a tougher administrative burden on suppliers, which could lead to an increase in the overall cost of outsourcing.

Organisations that are about to enter into new outsourcing arrangements should be aware that their data protection obligations may change during the course of the arrangements. Contractual provisions should be drafted accordingly, for example to make data protection provisions subject to amendment to comply with legislative changes.

The key message for customers and suppliers is: watch this space. It will be some time before the measures are implemented, but the scope and effect of data protection legislation is likely to change significantly.

While 2011 saw cloud come of age with increased business adoption, for many, it was characterised by a series of high profile outages, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Amazon all fell – the collective grumblings of customers becoming headlines the world over.

Despite this public reckoning, industry analysts like Gartner and IDC continue to see a bright future for cloud. And so they should. The fact that some of the biggest players experienced outages demonstrates the reality of the cloud; it’s not a hallucination, it’s made up of real servers, stored in physical data centres. Like all IT, it will always be subject to some form of disruption, or disaster. What sets the cloud aside, is the capability of providers to mitigate this risk, and get you back up and running.

Of course, if you procure a service, best practice stipulates an expectation of service levels. It pays to be realistic though, no service can ever achieve 100% uptime. Even your own in-house data centre is unlikely to do so (and though I’m sure few would admit, in most cases, the impact is harder if your own services go down). And if anyone claims their service is infallible, they’re having you on.

Organisations need to seek the service and provider that places clear SLAs on disaster recovery. Downtime is, in most cases, rare but when it does happen the question you’ll be asking is ‘how quickly can operations be restored?’

Firstly, don’t underestimate customer service levels - feeling confident that you have access to your service provider in the worst case scenario is key. Guaranteed SLAs that speak to round the clock support - online and telephone - is an important safety blanket.

Due diligence at the procurement stage is important too. Review a service provider’s capabilities with the same rigour you would any of your own internal processes or services. This should include an assessment of your own DR capabilities, and what role you’ll need to play (not even cloud services mean you can absolve all responsibility!) in resuming services.

Consider, for instance, ‘premium’ versus ‘standard’, ‘gold’ versus ‘silver’ – every service provider has a classification. Buying the cheapest often means compromising on SLAs: customers who buy premium, on the other hand, will receive a priority service.

It’s unlikely, however, that all your services will require a priority DR response (and price), so identify which applications or data will need to resume service fast. This will enable you to better manage not only the restoration of services and resources, but also your budget.

Take mission-critical services such as internet, email and voice access. Any service provider worth their salt should understand the impact downtime can have here i.e. it could mean their customers cease trading. So, the premium DR package is what you are looking for here – comprehensive archiving and recovery, with back-ups stored offsite in secure data centres and maximum service availability.

Let’s be realistic, there will always be some events we can’t see coming - natural disasters, freak weather and the like. What you can do though, is make sure your business is best placed to survive it. Your agreement with your cloud provider is the lynchpin to making sure the right practices are in place to make the aftermath painless.

Like the analysts’ fearless and bold predictions for cloud in 2012 and beyond, I’ll make one too… There will be cloud outages. However, if it happens to you, it really doesn’t have to impact your business productivity.