Industry news

The FundsNetwork Navigator service uses internally developed risk profiling techniques to gauge clients’ tolerance for risk. The system then recommends one of the three Multi Asset Allocator funds of funds that Fidelity launched in October 2011 for Trevor Greetham, which are called Defensive, Balanced and Growth.

This is the first time the FundsNetwork platform has offered advisers a proprietary ‘end-to-end’ way for them to outsource investment management.

The launch puts the group up against similar offerings from Skandia, which offers the Spectrum fund suite and risk-profiling tools, and Standard Life, which offers MyFolio.

Striking public sector staff picketed council offices in protest against plans to outsource services to the private sector.

Public sector union, Unison, say Barnet Council's One Barnet project could see 70 per cent of council workers become private sector employees in under a year, with many being forced to work outside of the borough.

But staff from various council departments, including trading standards, planning, highways, and parking services, say they want to remain council employees. They claim that services and therefore taxpayers will suffer under the new plans.

The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) has announced three new police hubs to tackle web crime are set to launch.

The hubs in Yorkshire and the Humber, the north-west and east Midlands, will go live "imminently", with some officers undergoing training immeadiately.

The hubs, announced in November, will focus on online crime, with the exception of online child abuse which is already covered by units that specialise in the area. The units will be funded from a budget of £30m over four years, granted by the government to improve national capability to investigate and combat web crime.

Oracle Corp. made its second acquisition in three months, agreeing to buy human-resources software company Taleo Corp. (TLEO) for about $1.9 billion to expand in cloud computing and respond to a December deal by SAP AG. (SAP)

Holders of Taleo will get $46 a share, Redwood City, California-based Oracle, the second-largest software company, said today in a statement. That’s 18 percent higher than Taleo’s closing share price yesterday. Taleo gives Oracle tools that help companies manage human resources, recruit employees and set compensation

Barclays has reported a 3% fall in profits to £5.9bn for last year, hit by a slowdown at its investment bank arm.

The bank also said the bonus pool at the investment banking division was down 32% to £1.5bn in 2011.

There was no immediate news on the bonus for its chief executive Bob Diamond, reportedly in line for a payout worth several million pounds.

MSPexcellence, the business-building consultancy for Managed Services Providers (MSPs) and Cloud Solutions Providers (CSPs) has been selected by two leading providers of hosted cloud services to expand their market coverage with a channel of indirect sales partners to resell their hosted cloud services.

External IT, a leading provider of comprehensive cloud-based IT solutions and Global Micro, the first and the largest provider of hosted services in South Africa, are both working with MSPexcellence to roll out a structured channel program to enable VARs, interconnects and MSPs to become certified channel partners and successful Cloud Solutions Providers.

Can you innovate like Renew?

Necessity is the mother of invention. And when the City of London decided it had a litter problem, it turned to some rather inventive outsourcers to solve it.

There are many definitions of innovation outsourcing. The NOA innovation Steering Committee, spearheaded by Lee Ayling of KPMG and IBM’s Tony Morgan, define it as "the application of new ideas, ways of working and/or the use of existing ideas in a new context to deliver value through change".

The above definition is a mashup of other definitions from across the industry. That’s what innovation is mostly, a mashup. We in live in an age where hardly anything is new, everything is a bricolage of ideas and intellectual property that are already out there.

Five years in the making, a mega mashup of existing technology and ideas has landed in the Square Mile to give litterbug city boys and girls somewhere to drop their used newspapers. But it’s much more than just a bin. It’s got functionality that James Bond’s gadgetsmith Q would be proud of.

The Renew Bin is a receptacle for recycling with LCD screens providing transport updates and news headlines. Some critics say this is pointless, as people have mobile devices for both those functions. But this super-bin is capable of interacting with smartphones, and as it is fully Wi-Fi capable, it will soon be bringing internet hotspots to the streets of the City.

For a rubbish bin, it’s good in a crisis too. That’s when they could really come into their own. Not only is it bomb proof - numerous explosions in the New Mexico desert bear testament to that - it displays vital information in times of emergency, such as bomb scares, to direct pedestrians away from certain localities or tube stations. So when the phone networks are overloaded, Londoners can remain in the loop and out of the danger zone.

It’s an innovative outsourcing contract too. Although are the bins are rumoured to cost £30k each, no money is believed to have changed hands between the City of London and Renew. Instead, the ‘recycling unit’ manufacturer makes its money through sponsorship by companies wanting to adorn the bins, to demonstrate their corporate social responsibility credentials.

The Renew recycling unit is a classic example of innovation: bringing a wide variety of existing concepts together, to form something fresh that fulfils a need, profitably.

Bravo Renew, bravo

Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, yesterday opened its Manchester guest contact centre with a reception for government officials and local business leaders.

Based at the Voyager Building at Manchester Airport, the guest contact centre is the airline's first in Europe and fourth in the world. It will operate in conjunction with existing guest contact centres in Abu Dhabi, Al Ain and India.

The guest contact centre will provide full time employment for 160 local people, all of whom will receive extensive training in all aspects of the company's global reservations system.

More than 1,100 jobs from central government departments and agencies were outsourced to the private sector in the last financial year, new research has uncovered.

The findings, uncovered through a series of questions tabled by former Labour cabinet minister Frank Dobson, have prompted union fears that savings are being made not through efficiencies, but through cuts to pay and conditions of staff, as evidence emerges of hundreds more outsourcing schemes being tendered across the country.

CSC swung to a fiscal third-quarter loss on a $1.49 billion write-down of its investment in a disputed contract with the U.K.'s state-run health service.

However, adjusted earnings were better than anticipated, pushing shares up 2% to $26.99 in recent premarket trading. Through the close, the stock is down 53% in the past year.

New business awards totaled $4.1 billion, up from $2.3 billion a year earlier.