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[...]

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[...]

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[...]

NelsonHall recently attended an HP Enterprise Services (HP ES) analyst and adviser event in London focused on its European BPO business - on what was the first working day of its FY 2015. The tone was very upbeat: FY 2014 was a good year, with HP ES winning 11 out of the 12 BPO deals for which it bid, for an overall TCV of $1bn+ And management described its pipeline for FY 15 as “[...]

Randstad Sourceright Analyst Day 2014: RPO In High Gear Last week Randstad Sourceright held its first analyst event. Services covered included MSP, independent contractor solutions, technology, RPO, employer branding, veterans hiring initiatives, and career transition services. My focus here is primarily on Randstad Sourceright's RPO activity. RPO in High Gear In 2014 YTD Rand[...]

This is the final in a series of short blogs that look at various disruptive forces and their impact on BPO. The impact of all these disruptive factors is that BPO is now changing into something that the client has always wanted namely “High Velocity BPO”. In its early days, BPO was a linear and lengthy process with knowledge transfer followed by labor arbitrage, followed by process[...]

IBM recently held its annual IBM Alliances event, focusing on SAP and Oracle (other major IBM-wide partners include Microsoft, Infor, Cisco, Juniper Networks and Citrix). IBM Alliances manages major relationships with technology vendors that cross several IBM service lines, e.g. GBS, GTS, Systems & Technology, and Software. Those seven major partnerships are significant and command ~15% of ove[...]

In our discussion, we’ve missed out lots of fashionable disruptors like mobile and cloud and these are indeed important elements within BPO. However, let’s be more futuristic still and consider the impact of the Internet of Things. Some examples of current deployment of the Internet of Things are as follows  Sector  Examples [...]

BPO has always depended on partnerships with third-party software providers to provide supplementary platforms around client core systems to provide specialist functionality in areas like procurement, collections, & reconciliation handling. However, there is a danger that this can lead to a Heath Robinson (or Rube Goldberg) combination of applications, involving expensive software or SaaS[...]

There has always been a big divide between those suppliers that are comfortable handling voice and those suppliers that were comfortable handling data with very few comfortable with both. However, the impact of digital is such that it increases the need for voice and data convergence. A common misconception in customer service is that the number of transactions is going down. It isn’t, it[...]

There’s another disruptive force in BPO that no-one likes to talk about. It’s called labor arbitrage. Everyone is keeping a bit quiet about this one. It’s nothing like as sexy as robotics, or analytics, or SMAC, but it’s also a disruptive force. One side of labor arbitrage within labor arbitrage is relatively defensive, but in spite of automation and robotics, mature &ld[...]