Industry news

Wipro Technologies, the global Information Technology, Consulting and Outsourcing business of Wipro Limited, has been chosen by Premier Foods, the United Kingdom’s largest food producer, as a strategic technology partner. Premier Foods plc produces and markets over 40 iconic British brands.

As part of the five year strategic relationship, Wipro will be supporting both systems and processes to enhance efficiency of Premier Foods’ supply chain. This relationship will enable Premier Foods to realize quantifiable benefits for a known budgetary expenditure with minimal exposure to variable costs.

According to Mark Vickery, Group I.S. & Change Director, Premier Foods, “We would like to congratulate the Wipro team for their focus, commitment and the passion in the discussions leading to our decision. Wipro’s strong SAP capabilities along with their deep CPG domain expertise made Wipro a natural fit for Premier Foods."

Diligenta, a subsidiary of Tata Consultancy Services and a leading BPO provider in the U.K., will assume administration responsibility for 3.2 million policies for Friends Life, a provider of pensions, investments and insurance. The agreement, effective March 1, 2012, is worth $2.2 billion over a 15-year period.

The deal will increase the total number of policies administered by Diligenta to just under eight million. Outsourcing much of its customer service and IT functions for its U.K. heritage business will allow Friends Life to focus on its new proposition developments, including its new corporate platform, in its core markets of corporate benefits, protection and retirement income.

N. Chandrasekaran, CEO and MD, TCS, and Chairman, Diligenta, said, “Our domain-centric, platform-based solutions enable us to help companies transform their businesses. Our strong presence in the insurance segment, track record and the early investments in building products and platforms have contributed to this win. This deal is the second largest one signed by TCS after the $2.5 billion Citi deal some years ago.”

The National Outsourcing Association Awards (NOAAs) took place last night (10th November), at the Park Plaza Riverbank Hotel in London. Now in its 8th year, the NOAAs celebrate best practice in outsourcing projects, and reward end-users, suppliers, advisors and destinations.

The awards were presented by comedian, Imran Yusuf. After the presentations and speeches, the party continued well into the wee small hours.

The proud winners were:

BPO Contract of the Year

National Rail Communication Centre and National Rail Enquiries

This contract delivered very real benefits to the general public through improved information and continuous performance improvements throughout the year.

IT Outsourcing Project of the Year

Wipro Technologies and Diversey

The judges felt the project was a powerful example of continuous IT service improvement and demonstrated various improvement techniques working together to generate impressive benefits, whilst streamlining the budget spend on IT infrastructure and new application development.

Financial Services Outsourcing Project of the Year

Co-Operative Banking Group, Operational Partnerships Management, Implementation of alternative format provision

This project involved a developing a future-ready scalable solution for customers with dyslexia or learning difficulties. The bespoke service allows for documentation to be designed to meet the specific needs of the customer, including the use of MP3 and Wav technology, as well a secure pin process for the visually impaired.

Public Sector Outsourcing Project of the Year

Arvato and Chesterfield Borough Council

Judges were impressed with Arvato’s transparent approach to service delivery – flagging, discussing and resolving issues in ways that prioritise citizen satisfaction and value for money.

Telecommunications, Utilities and High-Tech Outsourcing Project of the Year

Efficio Consulting Ltd and Thames Water

The panel felt that this award reshaped the procurement outsourcing space, by moulding the best features of a classic consulting engagement and a traditional outsourcing model. The results gave compelling benefits, enabling Thames Water to exceed all of the original project objectives.

Offshoring Operation of the Year

RR Donnelley and Anglian Water

This offshore pilot has proved a resounding success – delivering an effective solution for processing the large amount of correspondence generated by Anglian Water’s customers. This operation was recognised for bringing together the best outsourcing operations with excellent workflow technology.

Outsourcing Professional of the Year

KPMG – Shamus Rae

The judges felt that Shamus showed deep domain expertise, extraordinary creativity and was a very strong candidate based upon his industry experience helping organisations with strategy, implementation and execution of change programmes focused on corporate services.

Outsourcing Service Provider of the Year

Luxoft

The judges felt that Luxoft’s submission showed excellent depth in all key areas of successful outsourcing, along with copious good examples of corporate social responsibility across all of its collaborations.

Outsourcing Contact Centre Provider of the Year

bss and Office for National Statistics and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency

The 2011 Census contact centre handled nearly 1 million phone calls, in 10 weeks, without any downtime. This project won due to its complexity, while not getting in the way of delivering a solution to the massive benefit of the authorities and the public alike.

Outsourcing Advisory of the Year

Hogan Lovells International LLP

Over the last year, Hogan Lovells has advised on most of the key outsourcings in the asset management, insurance and life and pensions sectors. This was a closely fought award; however, the judges felt that Hogan Lovells consistently delivered a wide variety of innovative and high-profile solutions throughout the year.

Offshoring Destination of the Year

Luxoft - Poland

Poland is the sole European country to demonstrate positive economic growth throughout the crisis. The total value of British investment in Poland has now reached $3.54 billion. The judges felt that the entry from Luxoft was extremely strong and demonstrated that Poland has remained price competitive with the required labour skills. It is expected the Polish IT market will maintain its status as one of the CEE’s fastest growing IT markets over the 2010–2014 forecast period.

Outsourcing End-User of the Year

Thames Water and Efficio Consulting Ltd

Thames Water’s “fully integrated consultancy” delivery model has challenged the market norm, creating compelling benefits. This project has been rewarded for its strong focus on leadership and relationship management. This emphasis on an effective gain-share pricing model has resulted in cost savings far greater than set out in its internal business case.

Award for Innovation in Outsourcing

Serco and Barclays Cycle Hire

Serco delivered Boris Johnson’s vision of making London a genuinely cycle friendly city, whilst having to learn an entirely new business and multi-sourcing with 10 sub-contractors. With 5000 bikes, and 10,000 docking points, the system is highly complex, yet very easy to use, making a positive contribution to the lives of 1000s of environmentally conscious Londoners.

Award for Best Practice in Outsourcing

Co-Operative Banking Group, Operational Partnerships Management, Supplier Operating Model

CFS’s relationship management capability provides a disciplined consistent, approach to making CFS an intelligent customer. It powers effective collaboration between all business stakeholders within the sourcing lifecycle – nurturing a culture of common language and thinking across the full range Co-operative business units.

Award for Academic Achievement

HML – Anu Biswas

2011 NOA Pathway graduate Anu Biswas worked her way to the top of the class with a tailored outsourcing development plan for an actual project, and input these into the HML strategy. Her project focused on development of the right skills, knowledge and behaviours to be able to strategically lead an outsourcing organisation.

Award for Corporate Social Responsibility

Infosys BPO Ltd and Project Genesis

This successful project follows a “train the trainer” model and has reached out to over 85,000 students through 2888 academicians in 1527 educational institutions in India.

Judges agreed this innovative programme provides students with the relevant proficiencies to perform well in this dynamic industry. Additional acknowledgements were made on the range of the industry partnerships and use of technology in analysing skills and enhancing language skills.

Samsung is to start paying Microsoft royalties for every sale of its smartphone and tablet computers that run the rival Google Android platform.

Microsoft has long accused Android of violating its patents.

Google said its US rival Microsoft was "resorting to legal measures to extort profit from others' achievements and hinder the pace of innovation".

Accenture, the global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company has closed a deal to acquire Zenta, a residential and commercial mortgage processing services firm, by this month-end.

Accenture has started rebadging the US-headquartered Zenta’s 3,700 employees in India.

Capgemini Group reports Q3 2011 consolidated revenues of €2,378 million, up 13.0% on published revenues for the same period last year. Like-for-like growth (i.e. at constant Group structure and exchange rates) is 4.7%, with the difference between the two rates mainly due to acquisitions by the Group during the last 12 months (particularly CPM Braxis in Brazil and Prosodie in France).

This 4.7% growth in revenues, on a like-for-like basis, breaks down as follows:

· by business, the so-called “cyclical” activities (Consulting Services, Technology Services and Local Professional Services) continued to report sustained growth (+6.1% on average), with the greatest increase recorded by Technology Services (+7.2%). Outsourcing Services reported an average rise of 2.7%, while BPO enjoyed remarkable growth (+20%).

· by region, North America increased 5.0%; France – which retains its position as the Group’s leading country – reported improved revenue growth (+7.8%) on the first-half of the year; the United Kingdom and Ireland region, still affected by public sector spending cuts, reported more moderate growth (+1.3%), while the other regions reported average growth of 10.4% (12.4% for the Nordic countries). Benelux was the only region to report a contraction in revenues (-5.7%), reflecting the economic crisis which continues to affect the Netherlands.

Outsourcing company Xchanging said it is making progress with its cost-cutting drive and stood to benefit from companies looking to save cash in the economic downturn, sending its shares up 12 percent.

Xchanging, which runs back-office activities such as invoice processing, paying staff and procuring office supplies, said on Monday its operating cashflow was ahead of its expectations after implementing a series of cost-cutting measures since March in what it has described as a year of transition.

"In our view, steady progress continues to be made by management simplifying and de-risking the business," Espirito Santo Investment Bank analyst David Brockton said in a note.

Cloud computing will allow financial services to operate more efficiently and at a lower cost, while also providing the ability to offer services that were previously economically unviable, Gartner finds.

Cloud services for core banking systems will be a top priority for Financial CIOs in the next four years, a recent survey showed.

The Gartner Executive Programs annual CIO survey was conducted by analyst firm Gartner and surveyed 2,014 CIOs in 50 countries.

The words 'Iceland' and 'Cloud' have instilled fear in every air traveller for the past few years. However, the two words now exist very much in harmony, in the form of cloud computing.

The country has been ear-marked as world hub for the future of online cloud computing due to its vast quantities of free, renewable energy and cool climate. It's the perfect location for sustainable data centres - and that includes cloud computing providers.

There's no need to worry about the ash. Protecting such centres from volcanic ash is much safer and easier than protecting them from floods and earthquakes – two natural disasters prone to the current word-centres of cloud computing.

Following successful trials of their energy efficient Odeum green servers, VeryPC has secured a large order from GreenQloud, the official Icelandic cloud. This deal is set to drive VeryPC into triple digit growth next year.

Under the deal, VeryPC will supply GreenQloud with large quantities of efficient servers that together contain thousands of processing cores and petabytes of data storage. These will power a huge number of virtual servers that will be used by a diverse range of clients around the world – clients that want to lower their carbon footprint.

More than 1,000 jobs are under threat after retailer Carphone Warehouse announced it was pulling the plug on its Best Buy stores in the UK.

The company has launched a consultation about closing the 11 shops as it shifts its focus to selling more electronics goods through its Carphone Warehouse outlets.

Carphone hopes to find the "large majority" of the 1,100 staff roles elsewhere within the organisation.