Industry news

ABN Amro is the latest bank to unveil job losses: it expects 2,350 positions to be axed over the next three to four years as part of an efficiency drive.

Banks around the world have announced tens of thousands of job cuts in recent months amid regulatory uncertainty, weak economic growth and fears of another downturn. ABN's London operation, which employs 500 people, is expected to be spared, with most redundancies in the Netherlands, headquarters of the predominantly Dutch bank

Wipro BPO, the Business Process Outsourcing arm of Wipro Technologies today announced the inauguration of its first rural BPO center at Manjakkudi Village in Tamil Nadu. Wipro Technologies is the Global Information Technology, Consulting and Outsourcing business of Wipro Limited.

The Manjakkudi center has a capacity of 120 seats, and will open with a 50 seat pilot project for an international client in the retail sector. Wipro plans to expand its rural BPO operations to 500 seats by March 2013, in Tamil Nadu and to replicate this BPO model across other states in India, in the near future.

The Manjakkudi center is a result of a tie-up with the Swami Dayananda Educational Trust, a public charitable trust involved in providing quality education to the economically backward sections of rural Tamil Nadu.

Philippine Airlines has announced 2,600 job cuts as it looks to restructure its operations in a bid to reduce losses.

The airline is planning to outsource jobs in departments such as catering and passenger handling as part of its turnaround plan.

The carrier said staff affected by the cuts can still be employed by the firms contracted to provide those services.

Freelancer.com, the world's largest outsourcing marketplace, today announced that the site has passed $100 million in user earnings.

Freelancer.com CEO Matt Barrie says the figure proves that building a global team on a shoestring budget for any entrepreneur or small business is now a realistic, mainstream concept.

"More individuals and businesses are discovering exactly how far they can extend their competitive advantage using Freelancer.com," said Barrie.

"Through an established platform like ours, outsourcing results in quality output while simultaneously reducing costs. We estimate that the US$100 million in projects paid out through the site has saved businesses around US$1 billion in equivalent skilled labor costs in industrialized economies."

The Global LPO Conference, Los Angeles, USA – Buyers and Vendors Meet in the LPO industry is to be held on October 5th and 6th, 2011 at Sheraton Downtown Hotel in Los Angeles.

Organisers, KPO Consultants, have announced David Talley - Panasonic Electric Works Co. Ltd, Gururaj Potnis – Legatech, Rajan Thaokar - RnR Datalex, Alok Aggarwal – Evalueserve and David L. Stanton - Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman as key speakers at the Global LPO conference.

• David works as a Global Counsel for Panasonic Electric Works Co. Ltd. and is an expert of Strategic Planning, Development, and Implementation of Legal Services for Global Enterprise.

• Gururaj Potnis is the Chief Executive Officer of Legatech. He is driving the overall strategy to position Legatech as the leading technology centric LPO products and services firm.

• Rajan Thaokar is the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of RnR Datalex. Rajan as the CEO, sets strategic directions involving corporate re-engineering and growth and spearheads the company’s aggressive thrust into the global marketplace.

• Prior to Evalueserve, Alok was the Director of Emerging Business Opportunities for IBM Research Division Worldwide. In this capacity, he headed IBM's India Research Laboratory...

• Mr. Stanton is a member of the firm's Information Law and Electronic Discovery team. He is recognized as a leading lawyer in the category of "Litigation: E-Discovery Nationwide" by Chambers USA, a legal guide that ranks law firms and lawyers throughout the world based on independent reviews from clients and peers.

In-depth details of the conference at www.globallpooconference.com/losangeles

The Home Office is leading a change programme to modernise and improve the disclosure and barring services delivered currently by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) and Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA). They are seeking to procure new and replacement services for business process outsourcing and application services for the running of disclosure and barring services.

CRB and ISA will be merged into one organisation to be known as the disclosure and barring service at a date to be confirmed.

The current disclosure services enables organisations in the public, private and voluntary sectors to make safer recruitment decisions by identifying candidates who may be unsuitable for certain work, particularly work that involves children or vulnerable adults. The barring service assists in preventing unsuitable people from working with children and vulnerable adults in regulated activity. Services will require to be transitioned from the existing service contracts.

In addition the new contract will seek to support and implement the various recommendations from the criminal records review and the vetting and barring scheme policy reviews published in February 2011, the implementation of the Protection of Freedoms Bill, and look for continual improvements to the services provided over the life of the contract, including furthering the UK Government’s digital delivery agenda in respect of the services provided to customers.

US defense contractor Raytheon is demanding £500 million after it was dropped from UK's electronic borders project over poor performance.

The government appointed Raytheon to lead the £740 million e-borders project in 2007, but terminated its contract with Raytheon in July 2010 citing "extremely disappointing" progress.

Plymouth City Council is deploying a Microsoft unified communications system to support 4,000 staff with the aim of cutting costs and supporting flexible working.

The new Microsoft Lync platform, being deplyed by NEC IT solutions, will give staff individual and group instant messaging, video conferencing, a collaborative virtual meeting space and remote access and support.

IBM has announced a new hybrid cloud solution -- building on its acquisition of Cast Iron -- to help clients significantly reduce the time it takes to connect, manage and secure public and private clouds. With new integration and management capabilities, organizations of all sizes will be able to gain greater visibility, control and automation into their assets and computing environments, regardless of where they reside.

As a result, it should be significantly easier to integrate and manage all of an organization's on-and-off premise resources, and will allow a task that once took several months to be done in a few days.

"As a user of IBM WebSphere Cast Iron, we have been able to not only easily integrate our on-premise and cloud-based applications, but also provide live feeds of order data changes to our sales reps on any device, including mobile phones, tablets and laptops," said Randy Berger, IT manager, Process & Application Development, Siemens. "Expanding on the Cast Iron platform will help IBM provide even better access and management for hybrid clouds."

Verizon Communications Inc. has announced that it has acquired CloudSwitch, an innovative provider of cloud software technology, in a deal that will simplify the move to the enterprise cloud and help to boost industry adoption. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Verizon plans to combine CloudSwitch, with its Terremark IT services subsidiary, further accelerating the company’s global cloud strategy by enhancing Verizon’s hybrid cloud and cloud-to-cloud capabilities.

CloudSwitch brings Verizon breakthrough software that enables enterprises to more easily and securely move applications, or workloads, between company data centers and the cloud without changing the application or the infrastructure layer – eliminating a key barrier to widespread cloud adoption.

“The cloud market is a rapidly growing opportunity, with very real benefits both for our business customers and the consumers they serve,” said Bob Toohey, president of Verizon’s global enterprise unit. “With the acquisition of CloudSwitch, Verizon has taken another step forward in defining the enterprise cloud.”