IBM Quality Assurance and Testing Services (QA&TS) practice recently briefed NelsonHall on its approach to managing test cases and on reducing the numbers of test case automation, beyond pair-wise testing. Before we jump into the details of IBM QA&TS’ offering, let’s step back for a few moments: software testing remains a very human labor-intensive activity. If we take a man[...]

For over a decade, freemium has been the ubiquitous business model for fledgling internet firms and the developers of smartphone apps. Users sign up for free to enable basic features, and are then drawn into subscribing to various levels of premium functionality. More recently, the freemium model has been the subject of considerable attention in the B2B market research space, with some rather extr[...]

NelsonHall research shows that the top vendor selection criteria for buyers of RPO services include having a geographic footprint aligned with client geographies, and the ability to scale geographically to meet future needs. Over the last few years U.K.-based vendors in particular have been expanding their RPO and related recruiting and talent offerings globally, via M&As, partnerships and/or [...]

Last week, Cognizant released results for Q4 and full year 2015. At first glance, results looked strong. Q4 revenues were $3,232.5m, up 17.9% y/y, up 16% in CC, and adjusted operating margin was 19.6%, up 18 bps y/y and in the middle of the company's target range of 19%-20%. If we look at Q4 2015 revenue performance in Cognizant’s two largest vertical groups: Financial Services,[...]

Wipro announced yesterday it is to acquire Tampa-based HealthPlan Services (HPS) from Water Street Healthcare Partners for $460m, including a $20m deferred consideration. HPS' 2015 revenues were $223m. It has achieved a CAAGR of 38% in the last three years, driven both from adding new healthcare payers and from the increase in individuals or groups eligible for[...]

Much has been written about FinTech in banking. However, the focus has been on functionality enablement and consumer experience, with little insight into what the limits of FinTech benefits might be (and how that would shape an implementation strategy) or how banks can enable a roadmap that drives process improvement. Here I address both of these questions. What are the reasonable goals of FinT[...]

The cloud-based HR services offering contains many of the same services that traditional HR BPO/multi-process HRO (MPHRO) suppliers have provided, plus a few new components. Services can be divided into the three broad categories of pre-deployment, deployment, and post-deployment services: Pre-deployment services include HR cloud consulting, focusing largely on HR SaaS technology selection a[...]

For the last year, Fidelity has quietly been operating Fidelity Health Marketplace, a private benefits exchange, for a small number of SMEs in Massachusetts and New York. Fidelity Health Marketplace is a natural progression for Fidelity, which has been providing H&W services to large market organizations since 1995. Fidelity Health Marketplace is a one-stop shop that assists companies with [...]

As discussed in a recent blog, acquisitions in Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) have become increasingly aggressive year-on-year, and the pace of M&A activity shows no sign of diminishing, with three deals already done in January 2016: TrueBlue’s acquisition of Aon Hewitt’s RPO business The completion of the merger between Pontoon and its sister company, hyphen Orion[...]

For years, Aon Hewitt has been focused on strengthening its HR outsourcing capabilities around its principal offerings of benefits administration, HR BPO/multi-process HR outsourcing (MPHRO), and RPO services. However, over the last year, Aon Hewitt has sold several businesses as part of a larger restructuring plan: Payroll in Asia Pacific was acquired by Everstone Capital and is now operati[...]

NelsonHall is predicting 2% growth (in local currency) in IT services spending in 2016. This mild growth will be driven by project services (up 3%) while IT outsourcing will be up 1% and maintenance down 1%. Digital transformation services (see note & below) will drive growth (up 18%) along with software testing (still growing in low double-digit figures). 2016 Enterprise Spending in O[...]

For professionals involved in BPS activities, it might be a surprise that software testing (ST) shares a lot of similarities with BPS. Like many forms of BPS, ST is labor intensive – the largest software testing vendors now have up to 30k career testers and 20k has become the new norm. Like BPS, ST has adopted process improvement in a big way. And like BPS, ST is looking at process auto[...]

There has been a recent spate of acquisitions and partnerships among Financial Services BPS vendors which reveals interesting trends. These include the following deals from 2015: HCL and CSC: Two JVs were formed, whereby HCL will operate and expand the existing Core Banking business of CSC. The first JV will focus on account management and delivery governance while the second [...]

HRO has been one of the most active markets for acquisitions in recent years and 2015 was no exception, with ~30 acquisitions across all HRO service lines (up from 25 in 2014). M&A activity in benefits administration has remained high, while RPO acquisitions have become increasingly aggressive year-on-year. However, payroll M&As have also been ticking along nicely. One notable event was Ev[...]

NelsonHall’s latest Customer Management Services market analysis report, ‘Targeting CMS in High Tech’, identifies the need for increased customer service quality as the number one market driver. This is followed closely by cost reduction in second place, with increased revenue generation (through subscription sales, renewals, and paid-for technical support) third. The report a[...]

The biggest advantage of automation in CMS has been the ability to simplify, optimize and remove redundant workflow steps in the contact centers’ internal processes with the goal of improving the customer experience, and an end-game for vendors of increasing the number of value-add projects with their clients. Wipro’s Marvel CX is aiming to do exactly that. Marvel CX’s compone[...]

The U.S. healthcare payer BPS market is relatively mature, but is also shifting towards changes driven primarily by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the growing Medicaid and Medicare population, and advancements in technology offerings. Activity is primarily driven by the need for claims administration support with the use of automation services, member engagement services, and improved clinical ana[...]

CISQ and Structural Quality The Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) recently made an announcement related to software quality. CISQ is a relatively young organization, founded in 2009 by Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute (the organization that initiated the CMM process standards) and a slightly lesser-known organization, Object Management Group (OMG), an IT standard t[...]

Candidate and employee engagement is often referred to as a key priority for HR leaders, and while there’s a lot of activity going on to address this, the indications are that more needs to be done. In its latest white paper, Workforce Horizons, Capita reflects on the issues and challenges HR and resourcing leaders must overcome as they attempt to impact the bottom line, and high on the l[...]

Reflecting slightly improved macro-economic conditions, 2015 was an active year for M&A activity in the IT services industry. The largest acquisition - for some years - was that of IGATE by Capgemini. And there was a large number of small to mid-sized transactions. When analyzing this active M&A activity, several findings are striking: In spite of all the intensive discu[...]