“A lot has happened in the last 90 days and overall we're pleased with where we ended the year. We're reporting solid results that in some places exceeded expectations” Ursula Burns. Q4 summary: Services revenue was $2,725m, up 1.5% y/ y, and up 3% in constant currency: BPO CC growth was 4% (up from 2% in Q3) with growth in commercial healthcare payer, electronic[...]

This week NelsonHall held its quarterly IT outsourcing (ITO) Index webcast. We have conducted these calls for the last six years to monitor developments in ITO from a quantitative perspective. When we introduced the Index, ITO had largely moved from full outsourcing to a selective outsourcing approach, and Indian vendors were deploying their land and expand strategy with the occasional one-off meg[...]

By Amy Gurchensky, Liz Rennie, Gary Bragar 2014 was a busy year for HRO with ~60 partnerships, mergers and acquisitions combined. We now take a look at what to expect in 2015 and beyond for each HRO service line, including service offerings, market developments, and growth. MPHRO driven by continued shift to cloud-based platforms The Multi-Process HRO (MPHRO) market will grow with a mi[...]

Tech Mahindra has agreed to acquire SOFGEN to enhance its core banking systems integration (build, run, operate) capabilities. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of March. Swiss-headquartered SOFGEN is a specialist in Avaloq and Temenos platforms and also has capabilities in TCS BaNCS and Misys. SOFGEN has 450 employees, including >70[...]

NelsonHall, the leading global BPO and IT outsourcing analyst firm, has today launched a new tool to assist strategic sourcing managers in assessing vendor capability in Application Outsourcing (AO) services. This NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment Tool (NEAT) is now available to NelsonHall clients, and is also available for a period free-of-charge to buy-side organizations through Nel[...]

Tech Mahindra recently updated NelsonHall on its performance engineering (TMPE) capabilities.  The comments below complement an article on TMPE we wrote in January (see here). TMPE, part of Tech Mahindra’s Testing Services practice, is in high growth mode, having increased its headcount from 450 in early 2014 to 800 currently. Much of this growth has been driven by cross-sell[...]

I recently visited San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with CMS vendor Alorica. This nearshore America delivery location offers a low cost, educated workforce with strong native neutral Spanish delivery, as well as emerging support for English and Portuguese. The country is in the process of making English its official second language. Honduras, and specifically the city of San Pedro Sula, have battled n[...]

NIIT Technologies recently briefed NelsonHall on its testing capabilities. Headquartered in Noida, NIIT Technologies had FY 2014 revenues (ending March 31, 2014) of ~$389m, with an operating margin of 15.2%.  H1 FY 2015 revenues were ~$189m. Headcount at the end of H1 FY 2015 was 8.7k. The company is an unusual Indian Outsourcing Service Provider (IOSP) with a specialization i[...]

In the early hours of this morning, Atos announced it is acquiring the IT outsourcing business of Xerox. Full details of the acquisition are here. Atos is ending 2014 with a bang. Having completed the integration of Siemens IT Solutions & Services pretty darned quickly (certainly far faster and more effectively than naysayers would have predicted), it has proceeded this year to the car[...]

Accenture Q1 FY 2015 results are out today: 7.3% reported net revenue growth to $7,896m, operating margin at 15.0%. Full details are here. Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme opened the analyst call referring to an “excellent” first quarter and saying “I am extremely pleased with our results”. And here’s why: The 10% topline growth in local currency is the best [...]

Last week, U.S.-based Intuit acquired U.K.-based Acrede to expand into global payroll services. Terms of the acquisition were not provided except that closing is expected by Q1 2015. Inuit provides business and financial services, including accounting services to small and mid-size U.S. companies. Prior to the acquisition Intuit provided payroll solely to the U.S., and it will now be able to pr[...]

Tech Mahindra Testing Services (TMTS) has updated NelsonHall on its DevOps capabilities. TMTS continues to work with CA Technologies around this offering, largely around service virtualization (SV), application release management (ARA) and together with other ISVs/open source software around agile testing/continuous integration (CI). (For more information on the offering, please refer to the pr[...]

EVRY has announced its largest shareholders, Posten Norgen and Telenor Business Partner Invest are to sell their shares (representing a combined 70.24% of capital) to Apax Partners. Apax Partners has secured an additional 3.15% of EVRY shares from Folketrygdfondet (Norway’s government pension fund) and is to launch a NOK 16 per share all-cash public tender. The tender values EVRY at ~$6[...]

NelsonHall recently attended Luxoft’s first ever analyst event in New York. Luxoft is a young company - it was founded in 2000 - that is enjoying very fast growth (20%-25% depending on the year). For its FY 2015 it has guided on revenue growth of at least 28% (of which 25% organic) and an adjusted EBITDA margin in the 17% to 19% target range. Luxoft is targeting $1bn in annual revenues[...]

NelsonHall, the leading global BPO and IT outsourcing analyst firm, has today launched a new tool to assist strategic sourcing managers in assessing vendor capability in Property & Casualty Insurance BPO for the automotive sector. The NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment Tool (NEAT) for P&C BPO in the automotive sector is now available to NelsonHall clients, and is also available[...]

NelsonHall recently met with SQS top management and discussed key priorities in the short, mid- and long-term. Short-Term: India and Delivery Network A short-term priority remains the integration and development of the former Thinksoft Global Services, now SQS India BFSI. The acquisition of Thinksoft increased SQS’ headcount in India to 1.9k or 54% of the overall global headcount. S[...]

On November 20, 2014 Xerox announced its acquisition of Intrepid Learning Solutions learning services to expand it learning services portfolio and capability. Intrepid Learning Solutions brings in capabilities that include: Consulting services, including development of learning strategies, measuring their effectiveness and benchmarking  Course curriculum design and development[...]

In the last twelve months we have more customer management services (CMS) BPO investment in South Africa, including  Webhelp setting up centers in Cape Town and Johannesburg with an agent headcount approaching 1,000 Capita transitioning part of its O2 support to Cape Town in the form of a ~1,400 seat operation. One (of many) attributes that make South Afr[...]

NelsonHall, the leading global BPO and IT outsourcing analyst firm, has today launched a new tool to assist strategic sourcing managers in assessing vendor capability in Managed Service Programs outsourcing (MSP) as it relates to contingent workforce management. Also available is NelsonHall’s first MSP market analysis report, “Targeting Managed Service Programs”. NEAT Vendor E[...]

In September we wrote an event note following Infosys European analyst meet on the principal message in the keynote address by new CEO Dr. Sikka “Renew the core business, innovate into new businesses” (see here). Earlier this month we attended Infosys’ U.S. analyst event and its Confluence customer meet in Orlando. Dr. Sikka was about 100 days into his role, and we were lookin[...]