On 10th March, German energy BPS and ITO provider Regiocom completed the acquisition of customer management services (CMS) vendor SNT Deutschland to create a €230m provider focused on the German market. Here I take a closer look at the deal, and at the wider picture of consolidation and growth currently taking place in the German CMS market. An Energy BPS Specialist Regiocom G[...]

  Atos’ recent analyst event in Boston provided insight into its roadmap for 2017-2019. This note focuses specifically on its digital roadmap for the banking and financial services sector. While financial services is Atos' smallest industry segment (17% of 2016 revenues), it was Atos' fastest growing vertical in Q4 2016, delivering 10.6% organic growth v[...]

  CSS Corp. is a privately held Milpitas, CA-headquartered IT services and tech support vendor that NelsonHall estimates had revenues approaching $200m in FY16. The company has a new leadership team, many of whom are ex-Infosys, and it is now looking to expand beyond its core technical support offerings into the growing digital transformation and cloud migration market.  CSS Co[...]

  Wipro began partnering with Automation Anywhere in 2014. Here I examine the partnership, looking at examples of RPA deployments across joint clients, at how the momentum behind the partnership has continued to strengthen, and at how the partners are now going beyond rule-based RPA to build new digital business process models. Partnership Already has 44 Joint Clients Wipro initi[...]

  NelsonHall recently attended a Unisys analyst and advisor day in London. The tagline for the UnisysNOW event was Securing Your Tomorrow, with security taking a central role in the firm’s corporate transformation, along with a vertical-led go-to-market strategy, and analytics. Here I take a look at Unisys’ transformation to date, and at its future strategic direction. U[...]

  We recently met with the head of Capgemini’s Digital Manufacturing unit to get a perspective on the challenges in manufacturing and how Capgemini is helping to address them. Digital Manufacturing (DM), one of Capgemini’s newer strategic offerings, is a virtual service line across Capgemini units, having both portfolio and delivery responsibility. So What Does Digita[...]

  In our blog last November (see here) at the time of NTT DATA Inc.’s closure of its acquisition of Dell Services, we summarized that Dell Services was a strategic but expensive acquisition for NTT DATA, and that while the former Perot Systems did not thrive as part of Dell, now it is part of NTT DATA Services it is back to being a services pureplay, also that the appli[...]

NelsonHall’s latest Benefits Administration Services NEAT vendor evaluation included customer interviews to ascertain current satisfaction levels and future expectations across a range of criteria. Below is a selection of some of the findings from our interviews with benefits administration customers.   Principal issues & operational priorities Some of the more prominent issue[...]

  Hiring is cited as one of the top challenges faced by CEOs in 2017, set against a backdrop of government and regulatory changes. However, it is effective performance management, including employee engagement leading to retention of talent, that will be key to enabling organizational success. Here I take a quick look at how ADP is approaching this with a recent acquisition. La[...]

  Merger and acquisition activity in the payroll services market was relatively quiet in 2016, with most of the leading payroll providers focusing primarily on organic growth while investing in the development of new and enhanced solutions internally rather than on making big acquisitions. Also, vendors are continuing to establish strategic partnerships to bolster their delivery net[...]

  In a previous blog, I looked at L&T Infotech’s efforts in automation, and in particular around data, from an analytics and test data management point of view (see the blog here). In this blog, I take a look at recent advances L&T Infotech (LTI) has made in User Experience (UX) testing that go way beyond traditional testing approaches. UX Testing Expanding to Crowd Te[...]

Last week Aon Hewitt announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to sell nearly all the businesses within its Outsourcing segment (including benefits administration, HR BPO, and Workday cloud HR services) to Blackstone. Initially, it may appear that this is a step backwards from some of its prior acquisitions, including Hewitt in 2010 for benefits administration, Exult in 2004 for HR B[...]

  The insurance outsourcing industry is moving at a fast pace in response to the need for rapid deployment of digital platforms and offerings, as well as advancements in new distribution models that are emerging via ‘insurtech’ start-ups. Here I take a look at some of the key trends driving the insurance BPS market in 2017, both in terms of delivery and transformation, and [...]

WNS has just closed its acquisition of Denali Sourcing Services.  An investment of around $40m, funded primarily with long-term debt, this is WNS’ largest acquisition in a decade (since that of Marketics Technologies, which enhanced its ability to offer offshore analytics services in 2007). And it is paying over 2x revenues for Denali Sourcing Services. So this is more than a tuck-i[...]

  Last month, NelsonHall visited TeleTech’s delivery center in Sofia, Bulgaria, to discuss the company’s main European operations and the advantages and challenges of Bulgaria as a customer management services (CMS) delivery destination. From Sofica to TeleTech TeleTech acquired a local provider, Sofica Group, in 2014 and rebranded it in 2016. Sofica was one[...]

Accenture recently held a two-day symposium for the clients of its testing services to look at how testing services are changing, showcase its latest offerings, and allow successful engagements to discuss the keys to their success and lessons learned. Testing services are at a crossroads, as agile and DevOps have increased expectations around speed of delivery and driven convergence across [...]

  By Nikki Edwards & Gary Bragar In recent industry discussions around talent acquisition, we have identified a number of interconnected trends that are having a significant impact on talent acquisition markets. Here, we take a look at three key trends, and at how HRO vendors in the talent acquisition space are responding. Socio-economic trends An ageing, yet multi-genera[...]

NelsonHall analysts are regular bloggers, and while you might be familiar with a number of them, you might not be aware of the full range of topics that NelsonHall analysts blog about. We thought it was an opportune time to look back and pick out just a few of the many blog articles produced last year from different corners of NelsonHall research to give readers a flavour of the scope of our cover[...]

In the past ten years, we have seen most IT service vendors’ software testing divisions and the testing pure-plays rebadge from independent verification and validation (IVV) to quality assurance (QA) services. Vendors have been very active in expanding their service portfolio (non-functional, digital testing) and in leveraging IP and accelerators. Nevertheless, there still is a gap be[...]

  NelsonHall has been advocating for some time that software testing services vendors should focus on automating full testing processes or testing functions, and no longer be solely focused on standalone accelerators/point solutions. This is commonly called a ‘platform’ approach, and we define platforms as pre-integrated/interfaced COTS, accelerators and open source softwar[...]