Industry news

The Government has announced a ground-breaking partnership with 26 organisations to deliver a new era of consumer empowerment.

The businesses, consumer bodies and regulators involved are all committed to working with Government to achieve its vision for midata. And all are endorsing the key principle that data should be released back to consumers.

Google, Visa, Lloyds Banking Group and British Gas are some of the companies that have announced their support.

Launching the midata vision, Consumer Affairs Minister, Edward Davey said: “This is the way the world is going and the UK is currently leading the charge. We see a real opportunity here, but others, including the US and EU, are also showing real interest in the programme and the economic benefits it can deliver.

Hertfordshire county council is set to launch a council-wide e-market system, which will allow council employees to purchase adult social care services and members of the public to buy the likes of home care or day services.

The authority is working with Serco to develop the system, which will eventually include other applications for trading with schools and other items people can buy from the council. Hertfordshire has decided to go live with an adult social care application first, which it hopes to "soft launch" in April 2012.

Seeking to expand its content solutions business and gain better foothold in the education sector, SPi Global, the largest Filipino-owned BPO firm, has bought one of the most successful publishing BPO companies in India, the pioneering Laserwords Private Limited.

“With the combined strength of two leaders in the global publishing space, our clients will get even more comprehensive suite of solutions for print, electronic and database products,” remarked SPi Global President and CEO Maulik Parekh.

British Airways-owner International Airlines Group (IAG) is close to agreeing a deal worth around £300m with Germany's Lufthansa to buy Bmi's main business, including its prized take-off and landing slots at Heathrow.

The sale and closing of the deal remain subject to conditions including a binding purchase agreement, further due diligence and regulatory clearances. It is envisaged that the purchase agreement will be signed in the coming weeks and the aim is for the transaction to be completed in the first quarter of 2012.

The Indian government has clarified that personal data sent to India by customers outsourcing IT work there will not be covered by India's new privacy rules.

The Indian data privacy rules require companies to get written consent from individuals about the use of the sensitive personal information they collect.

This would have proved to be very problemative for the outsourcing industry due to the amount of contact details which go through contact centres and other operations on a daily basis.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has awarded Accenture a contract for up to seven years to deliver application development and maintenance services for its customer-facing systems including delivery of elements of the IT solution for Universal Credit, the U.K. government’s program to simplify working-age benefits systems into a single streamlined system.

The value of the Accenture contract could range from £50 million to £70 million per year, depending on Departmental demand for IT services.

Accenture has chosen to partner with Atos based on its strong track record of successfully delivering IT services for DWP, and with a particular focus on delivering secure online citizen self-service applications. As Accenture’s main sub-contractor, Atos will provide the full range of application development and maintenance services.

“Our work with the Department for Work and Pensions will help to further improve the service they deliver to reflect the changing needs of U.K. citizens,” said Mark Lyons, Accenture’s U. K. and Ireland managing director for Health & Public Service. “Accenture will help DWP drive significant and sustainable cost savings. This new contract builds on our longstanding relationship with DWP and the successful delivery of similar projects with other public-sector clients, based on the deep industry skills and insight from our global network.”

Owner of the Mirror newspapers, Trinity Mirror, has almost completed its migration to Google Apps for Business.

The British newspaper and magazine publisher signed up to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) productivity and collaboration suite in August this year, having exhausted ways of cost-effectively maintaining its legacy email platform in-house.

It will also use the range of features from the SaaS suite that include calendaring, instant messaging and document processing and sharing, to speed up internal processes and encourage teamwork and innovation among its 6,500 staff.

Value Wales, a division of the Welsh Government, has initiated an ‘all Wales IT equipment and associated services framework agreement’, which will run from October this year, for two years with options to extend for a further two.

After a comprehensive tendering process, Softcat has been selected as one of only eight suppliers on Lot1 of the framework agreement to provide IT equipment and associated services into the public sector within Wales. This is for products that deliver – or allow users to access – services, including PCs, monitors, laptops, handheld devices, tablet devices, netbooks and thin-client devices, together with related maintenance, warranty, software and support services.

A spokesperson for the Welsh Government said: "The ITEAS III framework underlines the Welsh Government’s commitment and compliance to, respectively, both the National ICT Strategy and Digital Strategy for Wales, providing public sector organisations across Wales with the ability and facility to procure excellent IT products and services. All suppliers tendering were evaluated against a robust set of criteria, including technical expertise, performance and delivery, account and contract management, sustainability / environmental credentials and of course, value for money."

TPI, the Information Services Group (ISG) companies, has said that public sector budget pressures are driving an increase in the adoption of outsourcing as a strategy to improve operational excellence in Continental Europe and a wave of contract renegotiations in the United Kingdom.

The number of public sector outsourcing contracts awarded in Continental Europe jumped by more than 70 per cent in the first half of the year, according to data from TPI, the leading independent sourcing data and advisory firm in the world. The public sector’s total contract value (TCV) on the continent grew 40 percent.

For service providers this will mean placing a greater emphasis on forging close working partnerships with public sector bodies. Duncan Aitchison, Partner and President, EMEA, TPI, said: “Understanding the difficult path the government now has to take and negotiating the balance between providing a value proposition, with services that help governments achieve often complex goals in a streamlined way will be key for outsourcers moving forward.”

The company, formed 18 months ago from the merger of Orange and T-Mobile, said the cuts would affect employees at its sites in London, Bristol, Hatfield and Darlington, who were briefed on Wednesday about the changes.

Everything Everywhere said the changes reflected “a new phase focused on accelerating the delivery of its ambitions” and that it “recognised and would like to thank” the affected employees, who will be placed in a three-month consultation period.