XEROX JOINS SMB CLOUD FRAY...Xerox Corporation has introduced a new suite of cloud services form small-and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). The services will be sold through Xerox’s value-added resellers (VARs) and include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for midrange and Intel systems; Cloud Backup; and Disaster Recovery services. Xerox says the services also manage workload demand and are priced to serve SMBs that have annual revenue of $10 million to $250 million.
Separately, Xerox announced that it is retiring the name Affliated Computer Services or ACS and the business process and IT company it acquired two years ago will now be known as Xerox.
SALESFORCE INTRODUCES DESK.COM...Salesforce.com has launched Desk.com, a customer help-desk dashboard that integrates Facebook and Twitter feeds alongside more traditional corporate channels such as email. As with all Salesforce services, this newest one is cloud-based; subscriptions start at $49 per seat per month. The target audience is small to midsized businesses (SMBs)that heavily rely on Twitter and Facebook to field customer complaints and service queries.
UNISYS FINANCIALS...Unisys Corporation reported fourth-quarter 2011 net income from continuing operations of $94.3 million, or $1.94 per diluted share. This compared with fourth-quarter 2010 net income from continuing operations of $95.2 million, or $2.20 per diluted share. For the full year of 2011, Unisys reported pretax income of $206.0 million and net income from continuing operations of $120.5 million, or $2.71 per diluted share. The results included $85.2 million of pretax charges related to debt reduction. This compared with full-year 2010 pretax income of $222.9 million and net income from continuing operations of $158.9 million, or $3.67 per diluted share.
BUYINGTEAM TO REBRAND AS PROXIMA, LAUNCHES MICROSITE...buyingTeam, Europe's leading provider of end-to-end procurement services, announced that it will transition to a new brand and from February 20, 2012, will be known as Proxima. The move reflects the scope and range of services that the company now offers its portfolio of blue-chip multi-national clients, driven by the growing importance that businesses place on procurement as a strategic corporate function in today's challenging economic environment. Details can be found at the company's new microsite.
Cognizant is doing good and doing well. The technology consultancy wants to stem the tide of slowly degrading technical education in the U.S. It has just made a $1 million grant over three years to bolster the technology and engineering portions of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education. Read more...
]]>The Basque Regional Government has selected Accenture to develop a strategic cost transformation program for the Department of Internal Affairs responsible for policing and public safety. Accenture will provide management consulting services to drive rapid cost reduction and operational efficiencies across the department's fleet management activities.
CGI Federal Inc.(CGI), a wholly-owned U.S. operating subsidiary of CGI Group Inc. has been selected by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) for its five-year, US$20.76 million cloud modernization project led by the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies (OCSIT).
UNISYS HELDS NOAA TRANSITION TO CLOUD-BASED SYSTEM..Unisys Corporation announced the successful completion of a project to transition 25,000 users in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to the Google Apps for Government email and collaboration platform--the largest transition to Google's cloud services by a federal agency to date. NOAA expects the new tools to help increase user productivity within the agency and to reduce operations costs by about 50 percent compared to in-house solutions. As a major subcontractor to Earth Resources Technologies Inc. (ERT), Unisys provided engineering and transition services to NOAA, including communications management and training. The team, which also included Google and Tempus Nova, completed all work on schedule, and NOAA transitioned to the new system in December 2011.
EARNINGS HIGHLIGHTS: Tata Consultancy Services - Net Income at $568 million up 9.1% Y-o-Y. Operating margins up 213 basis points at 29.2%. Growth seen across all markets and industries; Volume up 3.2%...WNS - Fiscal year 2011 revenues of $616.3 million, up 5.8% from fiscal 2010. 2011 net income1 of $9.8 million, compared to $3.7 million in fiscal 2010. Fiscal year 2011 diluted income per ADS of $0.21, compared to $0.08 in fiscal 2010...Infosys - Net income up 33 percent to $458M in the three months ended Dec. 31, from 17.8 billion rupees a year earlier...HCL Technologies - Consolidated net profit of INR5.73 billion for the October-December period, compared with INR4.00 billion a year earlier. Consolidated sales climbed more than 35% to INR52.45 billion. Net profit grew more than 15% and sales rose 13%.
WNS TEAMS UP FOR BI SOLUTION FOR UTILITIES...WNS announced its collaboration with Knowledge Relay LLC, a leading provider of Operational Business Intelligence products and services, to offer Data-to-Decision (D2D) services to its global clients in the Energy and Utilities segment, through user-driven, self-service operational business intelligence solutions.
While the typical benchmarking clause in an outsourcing agreement provides the opportunity to benchmark the services, many clients find third-party benchmarks to be expensive, disruptive and time-consuming. There is a better way.
]]>ADP BUYS RANSTAD'S INDIAN PAYROLL BUSINESS...ADP has acquired the Indian payroll business of Randstad Holding nv, NYSE Euronext Amsterdam, from its Indian subsidiary Ma Foi Randstad. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Ma Foi Consulting Solutions Ltd., the Indian company acquired by ADP from Ma Foi Randstad, offers managed payroll services and social benefits administration to clients across India through a fully customized payroll engine. The company uses this platform to serve approximately 350 brand-name multinational and domestic clients. As part of the transaction, ADP will take on a team of over 200 new associates.
ACCENTURE TO BUILD 1ST G-CLOUD ENVIRONMENT IN FRANCE...The French Directorate of Legal and Administrative Information (DILA) has awarded Accenture a three-year contract to design, build and deliver its Next Generation Data Center, the G-Cloud, in France. The contract supports the government's strategic technology goals to create savings by controlling costs. Accenture will work with DILA to build a more flexible IT infrastructure to increase access, availability and performance of nationwide public services offered to French citizens. The information will be stored on the country's first government cloud.
Insurers gather and store a tremendous amount of data. Predictive analytics combine powerful, fully automated discovery and analysis technologies to enable insurers to prepare for the future by learning from the past. Tell us what you think on the Outsourcing Buzz Blog.
]]>Cognizant has been selected as a strategic partner by INTTRA, a leading provider of e-commerce solutions for the ocean freight industry, to streamline INTTRA's applications and quality assurance portfolios. As part of the multi-year, multi-million dollar agreement, Cognizant will provide a range of application development, application maintenance, testing, and quality assurance services using the managed services model.
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) awarded CSC a task order to provide hosting services for its primary acquisition applications. The task order, which was awarded during CSC's second quarter of fiscal year 2012, has a two-month base period, four one-year options and one 10-month option, bringing the estimated total value to $45 million over five years.
Rio Tinto and CGI Group Inc., announced the renewal and expansion of their outsourcing contract. The three-year contract extension is valued at approximately $60 million.
]]>IBM ACQUIRES GREEN HAT...IBM has completed the acquisition of Green Hat, a privately held company jointly headquartered in London, England and Wilmington, Delaware. Financial terms were not disclosed. Green Hat, a leader in software quality and testing solutions for the cloud and other environments, helps customers improve the quality of software applications by enabling developers to use cloud computing technologies to conduct testing of a software application prior to its delivery. When combined with IBM's Rational software solutions, developers and testers can achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency, effectiveness and collaboration while delivering quality software to their business.
Insurers gather and store a tremendous amount of data. Predictive analytics combine powerful, fully automated discovery and analysis technologies to enable insurers to prepare for the future by learning from the past. Tell us what you think on the Outsourcing Buzz Blog.
]]>Spanish savings bank "la Caixa" and IBM announced a ten-year strategic services relationship. As part of the agreement, IBM and Serveis Informatics la Caixa, S.A. (Silk) will manage the infrastructure technology budget of "la Caixa" of more than 2 billion euro over ten years. IBM, through Silk, will provide technology, operations, applications and infrastructure services to "la Caixa" and will manage its data processing centers, located in Cerdanyola del Valles and San Cugat (Barcelona).
Maricom Systems, Inc., a CSC company, has been awarded a contract with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to provide enterprise data services to support the agency's information systems. The Enterprise Data Services Contract (EDSC), which was awarded during CSC's third quarter of fiscal year 2012, includes a base year plus five option years with a total estimated value of $105 million.
SIX Telekurs has renewed and enhanced its existing outsourcing contract with Capgemini for data production centers in Poland and India. As a consequence, it has decided to shift additional manual data input from five in-house locations to Poland and India. This partial shift of its in-house data input will affect around 70 positions at SIX Telekurs globally.
The French Directorate of Legal and Administrative Information (DILA) has awarded Accenture a three-year contract to design, build and deliver its Next Generation Data Center, the G-Cloud, in France. The contract supports the government's strategic technology goals to create savings by controlling costs.
]]>INFOSYS BUYS AUSTRALIAN SOURCING FIRM...Infosys BPO Limited, the business process outsourcing subsidiary of Infosys Limited, announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire all of the outstanding share capital in Australia-based Portland Group Pty Ltd, a leading provider of strategic sourcing and category management services. The acquisition is expected to be completed by early January 2012, subject to certain closing conditions being met. Portland Group was founded in 1999 and today counts several large ASX 200 organizations within the Australia region as clients. It is headquartered in Sydney and has offices in Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth. The company reported revenue of approximately AUD 31.3 million for the fiscal year ending 30 June 2011. The company employs 113 professionals.
HP NAMES PUBLIC SECTOR EXECUTIVE...HP has appointed Marilyn Crouther senior vice president and general manager of HP Enterprise Services, U.S. Public Sector region. Crouther is responsible for driving growth in the government IT marketplace, while strengthening relationships with federal, state and local government agencies. Previously, Crouther was vice president of Finance for HP's U.S. Public Sector region, where she was responsible for planning and directing all financial and accounting business for the region. She replaces Dennis Stolkey, who recently was promoted to lead HP Enterprise Services for the Americas region.
ACCENTURE REPORTS RECORD REVENUE, EPS...Accenture reported strong financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2012, ended Nov. 30, 2011, with net revenues of $7.1 billion, an increase of 17 percent in U.S. dollars and 14 percent in local currency over the same period last year. Diluted earnings per share were $0.96, an increase of $0.15, or 19 percent, over the same period last year.
Given the maturation of the outsourcing industry, it's likely that several of your transition team members have already gone through at least one transition. And that they've done so--albeit on different teams, even at different companies--can be highly advantageous to your initiative.Tell us what you think on the Outsourcing Buzz Blog.
]]>HP Enterprise Services has been selected by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) as one of 21 vendors to provide federal agency sponsored buildings and campuses with telecommunications infrastructure services and products under the Connections II contract.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) awarded CSCa task order to continue to operate and maintain USCIS' Verification Information System (VIS). The task order, which was awarded during CSC's fiscal 2012 second quarter, has a one-year base period, a one-year option and two six-month options, bringing the estimated total three-year value to $67 million.
]]>