Industry news

A major European national lottery has awarded relationship manager Convergys Corporation a multi-year licensing, support, and maintenance contract.

The agreement will implement Convergys Smart BSS Solutions, including Convergys Rating and Billing Manager, to support the lottery’s dealer billing and commissioning.

This new Convergys client required a sophisticated billing and commissioning solution that would enable it to quickly launch new and innovative games and commissioning schemes to retain and attract new lottery agents.

With Convergys’ integrated portfolio of Smart BSS Solutions, the lottery determined that it would receive the flexibility it needed to expand its market share in the newly liberalised and increasingly competitive European gaming market.

This national lottery manages games of chance including lottery, scratch card, and sport gambling games, and sells and collects revenue through thousands of resellers nationwide.

Premier Foods, one of the UK’s largest food producers, has renewed its long-term IT outsourcing alliance with Capgemini once more.

The new contract is worth an estimated £9m for the five-year period 2014-2019 and covers the Premier Foods’ IT infrastructure including data centre and technical support for all core business systems.

Under the contract Capgemini will continue to support the IT infrastructure that underpins the many famous Premier Foods brands such as Hovis, Ambrosia, Mr Kipling, Sharwood’s, Batchelors, Quorn, Loyd Grossman, Oxo, Bisto and many others.

The agreement involves the deployment of Capgemini’s Rightshore® strategy, which makes its global resources available to customers.

Capgemini teams in the UK, Poland and India will work in collaboration with one another and with client personnel with the intent of maximising service levels and cost-effectiveness for Premier Foods.

Systems supported involve hardware at Capgemini data centres in Rotherham and Bristol, with additional support from the company’s infrastructure management command centre in Krakow, Poland, and from a Capgemini development centre in Mumbai, India.

Capgemini also provides support for a number of key applications software systems at Premier Foods under a separate long-term Applications Management outsourcing contract.

The new deal follows the announcement last year of a contract between the two companies covering the period 2009-2014 which in turn renewed arrangements dating back to 2001.

With the decision Premier Foods aims to secure improved certainty of its IT costs, quality and service levels so that essential long-term planning and budgeting activities can be done with confidence.

Deutsche Welle reports that around 250 employees of Germany's Federal Printing Works demonstrated in front of Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, in Frankfurt on Tuesday.

The protest came as the Bundesbank considers outsourcing the printing of German euro notes to printers outside Germany.

According to the German union Verdi, 180 jobs in Berlin are on the line. Meanwhile, close to 400 jobs at Giesecke & Devrient, a supplier of banknote paper with offices in Munich and Leipzig, are also at risk.

The union said the decision would also jeopardise research and development work worth millions of euros.

The Bundesbank has said it's required by German and European law to advertise the tender EU-wide.

The printing contract has been tendered across the European Union attracting interest from printers in France and the Netherlands; Giesecke & Devrient has only been awarded a part of the contract.

The awarding of the contract, initially expected 2 August, has been delayed as the Federal Cartel Office investigates the matter. A final decision is expected by the end of the month.

Transport for London (TfL) has agreed on a new contract for the future management and development of the Oyster card system and other ticketing services with Cubic Transportation Systems Limited and EDS.

The move is part of TfL's £2.4bn efficiency savings outlined last week in its ten-year Business Plan. It replaces the existing Public Finance Initiative (PFI) contract, and sees TfL get ownership of the Oyster brand.

The system was originally created, and has been maintained, via a PFI contract held between TfL and TranSys, a consortium whose principal partners are EDS and Cubic; other partners included Fujitsu Services Ltd. and WS Atkins Consultants Ltd.

TranSys was responsible for developing, installing, managing and maintaining London's automated fare collection system including the Oyster card system, on behalf of TfL.

The contract was put in place in 1998 for a term of 17 years but in August 2008, TfL gave notice to terminate the contract with the TranSys consortium; the break has come into effect this week.

Cetrica has appointed David Bickerton as its global chief information officer (CIO); he joins from British Gas, a Centrica subsidiary.

Bickerton is now heading up the development and delivery of an integrated information system strategy for the energy group.

Bickerton joined Centrica in 2004 and has previously worked for Fujitsu and ICL where he held a number of general management roles.

As the British Gas CIO, Bickerton took the company’s IT in-house, breaking ties with IT supplier Accenture in a highly-publicised legal battle over a billing system.

He then rebuilt the firm's IT department which now comprises more than 600 employees, who have delivered around 180 projects in 2009 in connection to the billing platform. An additional 100 staff hires are expected this year.

The news of Bickerton's promotion follow the release of Centrica's financial results last month - the company's profits jumped 65% to £886m in the first six months of the year, fuelled by higher gas prices and a strong performance from its US arm Direct Energy.

The Centrica CIO role had been vacant for some time; the previous CIO at Centrica was Gareth Lewis, now chief information officer at the Financial Services Authority.

British Gas has yet to find a replacement for Bickerton.

Dell has acquired 3PAR, a global provider of highly-virtualised storage solutions with advanced data management features, including dynamic tiering and thin provisioning, for multi-tenant cloud-computing environments.

The acquisition will allow Dell to lead an open and integrated approach to data management delivers increased efficiency with a goal of radically reducing data management costs and significantly streamlining operations.

These savings enable Dell customers to make room in their budgets for other strategic investments. 3PAR’s product portfolio complements Dell’s goal to make IT simpler and more affordable.

Dell plans to make 3PAR an integral part of storage portfolio, including PowerVault, EqualLogic and Dell/EMC. With 3PAR, Dell will offer systems and customer choice at every storage tier, from direct-attach to highly-virtualised, clustered SANS.

The transaction is valued at approximately $1.15 billion, net of 3PAR’s cash. Terms of the acquisition were approved by the board of directors of each company.

After closing, Dell plans to maintain and invest in additional engineering and sales capability. There are no plans to move the current operations.

3PAR was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Fremont.

According to reports, the government of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu has revealed a special policy offering capital and training subsidy to rural business process outsourcing (BPO) units.

While Tamil Nadu is an important Information and Communication Technology (ICT) hub, the BPO industry's presence is mainly limited to Chennai, Madurai and Coimbatore.

With the ICT industry now expanding to smaller cities, towns and into villages the state government felt the need for a comprehensive Rural BPO policy to increase employment opportunities in the rural areas.

The decision seeks deepen penetration of the sector in the state, specific policy initiatives to attract BPO units to rural areas are necessary.

The Tamil Nadu government IT department will facilitate the process by liaising with interested institutions wishing to pursue a partnership with BPO units.

Also, a subsidy of 15% would be supplied on capital investments such as cost of hardware and equipment to any rural BPO unit that had been functioning at least three years and directly employing a minimum of 100 trained people.

New rural BPO units needing to train its operational staff, a training subsidy of Rs 1500 per month per person for three months would be provided by the government.

The policy anticipates will promote entrepreneurship amongst rural youth benefiting faculty and students of educational institutions.

Global provider of advanced application and product development services Luxoft, has opened its technical development centre in the UK.

Located in Welwyn Garden City, near London, the new facility is a significant investment in the company’s growth strategy and further expansion of its global delivery capabilities.

The Luxoft Development Centre has been set up to provide product realisation services for large telecom equipment vendors.

One of Luxoft’s major partners, Avaya, will help kick off the opening of the development centre by continuing its relationship with Luxoft at the UK facility, jointly working on the development of Avaya’s IP Office product range.

Luxoft’s Centre opens with a team of over 50 highly skilled engineers, with capacity for growth. With a larger presence in the UK, Luxoft will be able to better serve existing UK-based customers such as Deutsche Bank, UBS and Areva, as well as establish new partnerships in the region.

The full portfolio of services to be provided by the Development Centre includes: software engineering, complete product development, detailed trouble shooting of equipment, as well as customer support services and account management for UK–based customers.

Luxoft’s new facility complements current delivery sites located in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, enabling the company to offer blended onshore / offshore delivery capabilities to deliver highly skilled innovations and developments, cost effectively and with a customer-centric approach.

Electricians at St James’ Hospital Dublin are staging a one-day stoppage as a dispute over outsourcing work escalates.

Members of the Technical Engineering and Electrical Union (TEEU) will walk off the job the hospital after no agreement was reached at the Labour Relations Commission (LRC).

Union leaders confirmed emergency life and limb cover will be provided during the industrial action, but warned the technical services department will be affected.

This is the third stoppage by members at the hospital since the beginning of the month.

On 10 August, talks over outsourcing the work of electricians in the Technical Engineering and Electrical Union adjourned after three hours with no significant progress made.

The dispute is over management moves to reduce the role of electricians on site. Outside contractors have been brought in without prior agreement with the TEEU under agreed procedures. The union is concerned about health and safety, as well as job security issues resulting from the contracting out of services.

Other craft workers at the hospital, including members of Unite and UCATT, have refused to pass the pickets, leading to the effective closure of the Technical Services Department at St James’s hospital during the stoppages.

Transport for London (TfL) has published a tender for the provision of average speed cameras for a project it plans to trial, according to the notice published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 10 August 2010.

The government department said that the cameras will be used to "enforce average speed limits in urban areas", according to GC News.

The notice is a pre-qualification questionnaire (PQQ) and that there are no concrete plans in place yet, however it will form part of a wider project currently being undertaken with four London boroughs.

More announcements are expected to be made post-October.

The speed camera notice was published three days after TfL cancelled a tender for road traffic predictive modelling software due to tighter spending measures being introduced at the organisation.