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[...]

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[...]

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[...]

  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[...]

  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[...]

  In NelsonHall’s recently published Payroll Services market analysis report, the payroll outsourcing market is forecast to grow from $17.4 bn in 2016 to $21.8 bn by 2020. Growth is across all regions, with the greatest growth coming from multi-country payroll contracts. The multi-country payroll market is growing at three times the rate of the overall market and represents ~15% [...]

M&A activity in IT services is set to take a new direction in 2017. Here, I reflect on M&A activity by the largest IT services vendors in 2016, with its emphasis on mega deals, and look ahead to 2017, which is set to be the year of digital & security tuck-in acquisitions. Large M&As in 2016: IT Conglomerates and Defense Firms Divest IT Services Arms Large-scale M&am[...]

  Here I take a quick look at IT services markets in 2017 against the backdrop of widespread political uncertainty, with predictions for how IT services spending will be impacted. Political Uncertainties in U.S., U.K., Germany, France 2017 is starting out as a year of political uncertainty, with lack of visibility in the U.S. on the Trump administration’s plans, in the U.K.[...]

by Vicki Jenkins & Ivan Kotzev NelsonHall’s principal Customer Management Services analysts take a look at how the CMS market will shape up in 2017, with predictions for CMS delivery & transformation from Ivan Kotzev, and industry-specific predictions from Vicki Jenkins.   1. CMS Delivery & Transformation Predictions For CMS, 2016 marked a substantial shift i[...]

  Based on NelsonHall research conducted during late 2016, I have identified three key predictions for business process services (BPS) and IT services (ITS) in the Banking sector in 2017.   1. Compliance initiatives move from industry headwind to tailwind The first prediction is that compliance operations change initiatives will decline, and the resources released from th[...]

  “We connect the physical and the digital worlds” This current slogan for the Swiss Post Group is very relevant for its Swiss Post Solutions (SPS) subsidiary as it looks to fundamentally change the nature of its business from paper-based document management to digital workflow management. SPS is one of the larger companies globally offering both inbound document mana[...]