Industry news

University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH) has announced plans to save more than £1.2 million on its office printing costs by using Xerox managed print services.

The seven-year Enterprise Print Services agreement will enable the Trust to take control of its printing processes and costs, and forms part of a wider project by Logica to create an intelligent back-office infrastructure for the Trust.

UK contact centre industry expects close to doubling of speech analytics usage by the end of 2012.

New research published by ContactBabel, the contact centre industry analysts, reveals that UK businesses expect the use of speech analytics solutions to jump from a current penetration rate of 14% to 26% within 12 months.

Although 57% of respondents - the majority of these in sub-100 seat contact centres - do not have any plans to implement speech analytics, the installed base industry-wide is expected by contact centre managers and directors to be close to doubling within 12 months.

Microsoft Corp, the largest software company, has signed an agreement that lets it take a closer look at Yahoo! Inc.’s financial information to help it consider financing a bid.

Yahoo’s advisers asked that bids be submitted next week. Bidders are likely to offer to buy only a minority stake in Yahoo, as they haven’t arranged financing for a full takeover. It is possible Microsoft may help finance a bid and not try to buy Yahoo outright, two people said.

The South African government is considering reforming public procurement procedures, including simplifying purchasing laws.

Proposals developed by the National Planning Commission said public procurement laws have become increasingly complicated over the past decade.

The National Development Plan: Vision for 2030 states “When even honest and competent bureaucrats find it difficult to understand what their legal obligations are and how to comply with them, the law requires simplificatio."

Multi-national process technology firm standardises and streamlines IT with Agilisys Cloud Services

Multi-national process technology company PDX, has awarded Agilisys Cloud Services a three-year contract to provide a fully managed IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) worth approximately £1 million. The service will standardise and streamline PDX’s IT infrastructure in an end-to-end managed service covering: hosting, storage, provision of Microsoft technologies, backup and desktop support.

PDX provides technologies that enable companies in a wide range of markets to make their industrial processes more efficient by optimising processing cycles and reducing the use of resources and energy. For PDX’s ambitious growth plans it sought a cloud services partner to simplify IT systems management, increase visibility and control of IT processes, and ensure that all data is backed up, secure and fully auditable. Additionally, PDX wanted to improve incident reporting and how IT support calls are raised, tracked and handled.

Jarek Gorecki Head of IT, PDX, commented on the agreement: “We had reached a point where we either invested in additional infrastructure and grew our in-house technical team or found a provider to supply an end-to-end managed cloud service. We wanted to benefit from increased reliability and availability of scalable IT Infrastructure, and decided to make a major step-change in our IT provision by moving to the cloud. Our partnership with Agilisys Cloud Services will standardise our systems and infrastructure and transform the way IT is supported, managed and deployed. We see our IT infrastructure moving to a reliable, scalable and robust platform going forward.”

TPI, an Information Services Group company and the leading independent sourcing data and advisory firm in the world, today announced the European launch of its managed service for outsourcing governance, TPI Governance Services™.

TPI research has found companies lose up to 30 percent of the expected value of their outsourcing transactions through poor governance. TPI Governance Services offers a combination of management expertise, processes and tools to help companies reduce value leakage from their outsourcing agreements and third-party contracts.

“With the success and continued growth of TPI Governance Services in the Americas and Asia Pacific, we have seen increasing client demand for it in the European market,” said Claude Marais, Partner and Managing Director, Governance Services. “We’re looking forward to helping both large and medium-sized companies, which are often reliant on multi-sourcing, to maximise the value from their outsourcing relationships.

The National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) has renewed its communications framework with Cable & Wireless for the national communications network PNN3.

PNN3 is a service that allows the secure transmission of data between all UK police forces, criminal justice organisations and related agencies. The agency said that it negotiated a reduced cost for the two year extension, which was initially a five year deal.

Hewlett-Packard Denmark has announced Maersk Line, the largest global shipping company, has signed a $150 million-plus infrastructure services agreement that will support the shipper’s global growth strategy.

Under the five-year agreement, HP will help Maersk Line become an Instant-On Enterprise by using HP’s cloud-enabled data centers and HP Workplace Services to optimize its technology infrastructure.

“Maersk Line operates in a competitive global industry that demands innovation to create the agile technology infrastructure we need to be a leader among our peers,” said Adam Gade, chief information officer, Maersk Line. “HP’s global scope combined with its proven expertise in standardising technology across large enterprises will help us deliver greater value to our business and support our ability to remain the world’s most reliable container shipping company.”

The overarching idea of the '50 in 250 Challenge' is to get 50 large companies to sign up to buy from at least 5 Social Enterprise Mark holders within 250 days.

This ambitious challenge will attract the media’s attention and will gather pace once a number of organisations have signed up to the resolution.

This campaign has been designed to provide large corporate organisations with a meaningful and easy way to develop an ethical supply chain. For minimal input, you could reap huge benefits in terms of leading the movement of using social enterprises in your supply chain to demonstrate really meaningful corporate social responsibility and enhance your corporate ethical credentials.

You will be centre stage in this current debate, as well as receiving many PR opportunities and developing your networks.

More than 21,000 HM Revenue and Customs staff could strike over plans to allow private companies to answer taxpayers' enquiries, after a vote by PCS members.

HMRC is planning to trial the use of private contractors in two contact centres from January 2012 to deal with calls about tax credits.

The union says privatisation poses a serious risk to the security of taxpayers' information, and fears it could lead to further privatisation in HMRC and across the public sector.