Atos is to acquire France-headquartered technology vendor Bull for €620m in an all cash transaction. Atos offers €4.9 per Bull share, a premium of 22% over May 23’s closure price of €4.01. The offer is conditional on Atos receiving 50% and 1 shares. The largest shareholders of Bull, Crescendo Industries and Pothar Investments, which own a 24.2% stake in Bull, ha[...]

Capgemini held its 2014 investor and analyst day this week. For the first time since the beginning of the 2008-2013 crisis, the company has talked about organic growth, a significant development on its focus in recent years on margin improvement. Capgemini’s guidance for 2014 is organic revenue growth of 2% to 4%. The company has now shared a mid-term target of 5% to 7% organic growth. This [...]

Sopra Group is to acquire Steria for an all-share transaction valuing Steria at €722m. The acquisition is presented as a merger of equals. Sopra's rationale for the acquisition includes: Expanding its geographical presence from France to the U.K., Germany and Norway Gaining a new service portfolio in BPO services and IM. Sopra is to launch a public exchange [...]

NelsonHall recently attended an Atos analyst summit which provided a follow-up to the 2014-6 three-year plan first outlined last November (see our blog “Atos Unveils 2016 Financial Objectives”). As a reminder, the financial targets for IT services are: 2014-2016 CAGR of 5% with half of this growth to come from acquisition A 100 to 200 bps improvement in adjusted operating margi[...]

NelsonHall recently attended Computacenter's second ever analyst and advisor day.  The company highlighted recent achievements, its connection with hardware and software reselling and its immediate strategic priorities. CEO Mike Norris referred back to 2002 and the acquisition of Compaq by HP, which led to it losing a major source of revenues and[...]

T-Systems' parent company, Deutsche Telekom, has announced its T-Systems 2015+ strategic plan. T-Systems 2015+ aims to increase the EBIT profitability of the company and help it resume organic growth by 2017.  Principles of T-Systems 2015+ rely on a change in it service portfolio mix: Stopping of unprofitable offerings Adoption of more standardized service offerings, which will[...]

CSC and HCL Technologies have announced a strategic partnership for application modernization and IT cloud migration services. The two companies are to: Offer application modernization services around migrating applications to the cloud. The service will rely on several IPs, including the recently CSC-acquired ServiceMesh Enhance their existing vertical-specific app modernization o[...]

Capgemini Group together with its subsidiary Sogeti has launched a new offering, Global Engineering Services (GES), a product engineering/R&D services offering. The new offering focuses on four main services: mechanical engineering, embedded systems, PLM software-related services and technical documentation.  Capgemini's capabilities in PES/R&D services were consoderably e[...]

SQS recently briefed NelsonHall on its planned acquisition of a majority stake in software testing pure-play Thinksoft Global for €17.5m in cash. What will Thinksoft mean for SQS? More than double its Indian delivery capability: Thinksoft will bring in 800 FTEs and a center in Chennai. SQS currently has a center in Pune with 700 FTEs Retail banking client base: retail banking: acco[...]

Cigniti Technologies is looking to achieve ~$100m in revenues by FY 2016 (the year ending March 31, 2016. The milestone targets on this three-year journey are ~$50m in FY 2014 and $70m in FY 2015. To give a sense of the scale of this ambition, Cigniti’s FY 2013 revenues were ~$27m. Headcount growth targets are from the current 800 to ~1,200 by end FY 2014, and ~2,500 by fiscal 2016. [...]

Amazon Web Services has launched Amazon WorkSpaces, a public cloud-hosted standard virtual desktop offering. The offering mirrors the IaaS Amazon EC2 offerings of Amazon Web Services, with shared IT infrastructures, multi-tenancy, fast provisioning and opex models. Amazon Workspaces features include: A choice of different CPUs, memory, storage Storage is attached to each virtu[...]

Atos has unveiled its financial objectives for its Worldline unit. The company is to float Worldline by mid-2014, while keeping a majority stake in the company. Proceeds from the IPO are to finance organic growth and especially acquisitions. Financial objectives for the 2013-2017 period include: Revenue growth of 5% to 7% (2013-2017 CAGR) all organic (2012 revenues €1,066m, +5%; 2013[...]

Atos has unveiled its Ambitions 2016 plan in whch it has detailed how two of its key service lines (Managed Services and Systems Integration) will evolve over the next three years. Managed Services Managed Services (MS) is planning to grow at a 5% 2013-2016 CAGR with a slight organic growth. The unit has stabilized (organic growth 2011: +1.7% ; 2012; +2.4%;[...]

Cigniti’s mobile application testing road-map prefigures how overall software testing is likely to evolve over the next few years. Like a number of its competitors, Cigniti has launched a centralized service consolidated across labs, therefore allowing economics of scale. The company is able to share costs of its device estate investment across clients, at a minimal price i.e.[...]

Capgemini Group, through its Mobile Solutions (MS) unit, has briefed us on its recent mobile device management (MDM) offering, called Mobile Secure, launched with SAP and Amazon Web Services in May 2013 Capgemini MS has designed this offering to be as affordable as possible: the offering is marketed at a price of €1/$1.11 per device per month. It is based on SAP Afaria (acqu[...]

NelsonHall recently attended an Infosys analyst event in Europe, where it was briefed by Infosys on progress in its ‘Infosys 3.0’ strategy. The company is looking to build its Consulting & Systems Integration (C&SI) and Product & Platform Solutions (PPS) businesses while further strengthening its core Business and IT Services (BITS) businesses; the intent remains to deri[...]

SQS management has recently elaborated on its recent H1 2013 performance. Revenues were €108m up 4.9% y/y and up ~5.9% (NelsonHall estimate) organic. Adj. EBIT margin was 4.6% up 50 bps y/y. Activities per Service Line Managed Services (MS) revenues were up 24% to €42m (39% of total SQS revenues). Growth continues, but at a decelerating pace (H1 2011: +247%, H2 2011: +89%; H1 2012:[...]

NelsonHall is currently conducting a report on virtual desktop services and BYOD. The market is shifting from virtual desktop services to services that support choose your own device scenarios. Enterprise mobility, however, remains strictly confined to smart phones and to some extent to tablets. Traditionally, there were two main end user outsourcing offerings in the market:[...]

SQS has recently briefed NelsonHall on its on-demand testing offering announced earlier this month. The company has introduced two pay-per-use offerings around mobile and web applications.  In detail, SQS is offering a mobile application and web site performance testing service based on SOASTA CloudTest. It is also providing functional testing services for mobile applications and web si[...]

Infosys and TCS published recently their Q1 FY 2014 (calendar Q2) financials. The two companies provide as part of their financial reporting indications on their software testing activities. In detail, in Q1 TCS’s assurance services were up (a NelsonHall estimated) ~24% to ~$256m Infosys testing revenues were up ~+14% to $165m. The Q1 FY 2014 information is consistent with their[...]