Industry news

Severn Trent Water has appointed bpi. to develop a digital strategy that will provide a foundation for their customer focused online activities over the next three years.

Severn Trent Water’s main objective was to ensure that their online activity was in parallel with their key business imperatives and that their customers were placed at the centre of everything they produce from emails to social media.

Being one of six key agencies asked to pitch, bpi. impressed the panel with their user centred design approach (UCD) and understanding of the challenges faced by the business which has in the region of 75000 customers.

James Edwards, CEO and founder of bpi, said “We are excited about working with Severn Trent Water. We believe our collaborative approach to this strategy will enable us to understand the business needs and match them more closely with the needs of their customers.

We love to find out what makes consumers tick. This project presents a wonderful opportunity for us to delve into the behavior of a typical household customer and find out how digital can change the relationship they have with their services supplier”.

The global economic downturn continues to dominate the headlines, and the doom and gloom reported by the media seems to be getting doomier and gloomier by the day.

However, there are still investors out there who refuse to be scared off by this media scaremongering and who understand the basics of investment. This equates to opportunities for financial services providers and the outsourcers and technology providers which support them.

Forward-looking investors that were burned by equity income funds, absolute return funds, and products linked with exposure to financial stocks during the recession are still willing to consider corporate bonds and certain structured products, for example. For these investors, it’s simply a question of deciding on the term of the investment, what returns they hope to achieve, and then choosing the best product. For financial services providers, effective product strategies and clear, compelling marketing are going to be key to retaining and expanding market share.

Most of today’s investors understand that it’s never a good idea to put all of their assets and risk in a single asset class or investment, and so many people are now opting for low-cost funds that are adequately diversified in order to help reduce their risk. For example, it has become popular to diversify the risks within bond investments by creating a portfolio of several bonds, each with different characteristics.

Although the spectre of inflation – along with the potential for a rise in interest rates at some stage – normally spells bad news for the bond market, these factors have actually been priced into the market already, thereby making the bond market an attractive choice during challenging economic times. Even so, the nerves of many investors have been jangled in recent years, which means that the marketing of any financial product has to be carefully planned and executed in order to attract new customers and avoid costly mistakes.

For example, it’s now more important than ever for firms to establish their brand and reputation in the marketplace very clearly. Success in this area will rely on careful and strategic planning, since the products on offer, how they are marketed, administered and supported will all come into play here, whether the firm decides to focus on a niche segment of the market or a broader customer base. Outsourcing to a specialist with deep domain experience of this process can prove a cost-effective route to market.

It will also be important to develop a unique value proposition that will help firms to stand out from the competition. Although most investors claim to focus exclusively on the returns on offer, firms will need to use a certain amount of psychology here as well, since investors will be looking for products that appear to be safe, fair and reasonable, especially as many people have found out the hard way that products that claim to offer ‘guaranteed returns’ are not always what they seem.

Financial institutions will therefore need to make sure that they are aware of current market trends, and that they are able to keep their clients informed about their latest services and/or products effectively, since that is still the best way to encourage clients to purchase them. Even so, extensive market research, a thorough competitor analysis, and close ties with knowledgeable partners will still be be required to attract – and retain – today’s more financially conservative customers

Department of Justice has announced that Oracle has agreed to pay the General Services Administration $199.5 million to settle allegations the firm failed to honor the price-reduction clause of its contract with the government.

Oracle senior director Deborah Hellinger said: "Oracle has settled a qui tam case with the General Services Administration relating to a contract that dates back 13 years ago to 1998. Oracle vigorously denies that it did not scrupulously adhere to the pricing requirements of that contract. The company has always had strong controls in place to insure that the government agencies who purchased from the GSA schedule received fair pricing.

"Oracle never committed any fraud whatsoever. Given that the events surrounding this case took place so long ago, not surprisingly many of the witnesses are no longer available or do not clearly recall these events. Oracle has therefore decided to avoid the distraction and high cost of litigating this case by settling. We remain committed to the highest principles of integrity in our relationships with Government customers."

Mouchel was locked in talks to avoid breaching a banking covenant following a £4.3m accounting blunder that led to a profits warning and the hasty departure of Richard Cuthbert, its chief executive.

The outsourcer has overestimated the profits from one contract by £4.3m because of an actuarial error on pensions liabilities inherited from a local authority contract. Sources close to the company said it was considering legal action against the actuaries.

At the end of August SuperGroup implemented an upgrade programme to its warehouse management systems to increase capacity and efficiency at its Barnwood site to meet future growth in demand. Once live, the business encountered some short-term issues in the transition which has caused a significant, temporary reduction both in the amount of stock and range of sizes reaching its UK stores.

Superdry estimate that the total cost of this isolated event, including the additional temporary warehousing capability and resulting lost sales during the period, will impact the current year's profitability by between £6-9 million. Stock levels will also increase by c.£2 million.

MOJ intends to procure the services of an ICT provider including any proposed sub-contractors and/or partners to host, deliver, manage and support ICT services to NOMS and its associated bodies from July 2012.

The contract will replace the current services pending transition of MoJ ICT Services to the Future ICT Sourcing (FITS) target operating model (TOM). This is a much wider programme that will change the way ICT services are delivered from the current end-to-end contracts by line of business to an MoJ wide "Service Tower" model with separate contracts for service integration, end-user computing, networks, hosting, and application maintenance and development. FITS contracts will be advertised separately. Procurement activity is likely to commence late in 2011 leading to award of contracts in 2013 and transition by 2015.

The contract being advertised in this notice is for the provision of the whole range of end-to-end services for a period of up to three years with options to extend by 2 further periods of 12 months. It will provide an interim solution that will ensure business continuity between the end of the current service contract in 2012 and the transition to FITS by 2015.

Vertex, a leading global customer management outsourcing business with clients in the private and public sector has signed contract with Avanta, a specialist employability, enterprise and skills provider, to support the delivery of the UK Government’s Work Programme.

Avanta is managing the Work Programme in the North West, North East and South East delivering services that help the unemployed back into work.

Vertex will support both inbound and outbound customer appointment contacts, including organising ‘back to work interviews’ as part of the wider Work Programme.

Andrew Warren, Managing Director for UK Public Sector, comments: “We are delighted to be helping Avanta contribute to the Government’s Work Programme and importantly to be helping people re-enter the workplace.”

Peter Brooks, Managing Director, Avanta added: “Vertex was selected because it understands the importance of providing ongoing support to job seekers. We are committed to ensuring our customers can benefit from dedicated support as they move into a job with a future. We look forward to working with Vertex.”

Red Hat, Inc. the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gluster, Inc., a leading provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions for standardizing the management of unstructured data.

Red Hat is expanding into a critical part of enterprise infrastructure, which should enable it to deliver open storage solutions that protect customer investments as they approach the new era of computing.

"The explosion of big data and the new paradigm of cloud computing are converging, forcing IT to re-think storage investments that are cost-effective, manageable and scale for the future," said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat. "Our customers are looking for software-based storage solutions that manage their file-based data on-premise, in the cloud and bridging between the two. With unstructured data growth (such as log files, virtual machines, email, audio, video and documents), the 90's paradigm of forcing everything into expensive, single-system DBMS residing on an internal corporate SAN has become unwieldy and impractical."

Tesco Bank has delayed a major system migration programme. This has followed severe problems the bank experience in June that locked out customers from their accounts for three days.

The issues were the result of a summer switch over from RBS to Tesco-run technology.

Clarke, once Tesco’s IT director, said the company was “slowing down” the migration in order to ensure the changeover goes “without a hitch”. The problems the bank had experienced were “not good”, he said.

The Cabinet Office is planning to begin the procurement of services for the G Cloud with the publication of a tender notice for a framework contract later this month.

The Government is developing proposals for G-Cloud. This cloud computing infrastructure will enable public bodies to select and host ICT services from a secure, resilient and cost-effective shared environment.

The initial framework is set to run for six months with a three month extension option. This is much shorter than similar contracts and is likely to be followed by another that is tailored to reflect feedback from suppliers and public authorities. All suppliers offering cloud-based services will be able to take part, and the framework will be open to all of the public sector.