Alliance Data is to acquire Conversant for $23bn to expand its digital marketing services capabilities. The acquisition will be paid for half in stock and half in cash (at tendering shareholders' discretion). Post closing, Conversant will operate as a part of Epsilon, a digital marketing services division of Alliance Data. The transaction is expected to close in Q4 201[...]

TeleTech recently briefed NelsonHall on its growing healthcare sector business. A few years ago, TeleTech shifted its go-to -market strategy from being capability-led to sector-led. One of its key target sectors is healthcare, where TeleTech’s focus is U.S. tier 1 health insurance payers, providers and life sciences companies, also the personal health products sector. [...]

Mastercard, First Data, and TSYS have partnered with Apple to enable Apple Pay for mobile payments. Apple Pay is a mobile payment service. Apple Pay works with iPhone 5, iPhone 6, and Apple Watch through an NFC antenna design, a dedicated chip called the Secure Element, and Touch ID security. Apple Pay can be set up by users with their credit or debit card on file from their iTunes Store acco[...]

EVRY has announced that it is considering strategic opportunities including a sale. EVRY is in theory an attractive target: the company has a sizable presence in a region with short- to mid-term growth potential: It is the largest IT service vendor in Norway ($1bn in revenues, excluding its financial services unit). Norway, with an economy that is heavily influenced by oil & ga[...]

When you look at the financial performance of the four largest Indian oriented IT service providers (IOSPs) over the last four years, it becomes evident that there is a direct correlation between the level of topline growth they achieve and their expenditure on sales and marketing (S&M)…with EBIT margins benefiting from the strong topline growth. Let’s look at a few data points[...]

In a case that has been unfolding for several years now, and which heated up in early May, Accenture on August 1 assumed responsibility for administering Medicaid claims in the state of Texas. Accenture’s first award as a state’s primary fiscal agent was announced in the wake of a dispute between Texas and  Xerox over its process for reviewing Medicaid dental c[...]

Wipro has updated NelsonHall on its ServiceNXT initiative. ServiceNXT aims to increase productivity in both IT infrastructure management and application management contracts. ServiceNXT is based on: Usage of Wipro IP and recommended COTS tools across the client’s operation for various tasks including ITSM, change management, demand management, problem management Analytics, based on d[...]

The latest large partnership and implementation of Workday was announced August 13, 2014 by CSC who will establish a consulting practice enabling clients to transition to Workday, and also deploy Workday internally to ~70k employees globally. The move to launch Workday consulting and implementation practices, often alongside HR BPO capability, has already achieved considerable momentum. Similar[...]

Chesnara plc, the life assurance consolidator, has awarded a life & pensions BPO contract renewal to HCL Insurance BPO Services Limited ('HCL') which consolidates the services provided in the existing arrangements and which extends the service for a further 11 years. The service scope across the various books remains unchanged, as do the broad service levels. HCL’s original co[...]

T-Systems recently updated NelsonHall on its virtual desktop service offering, Dynamic Workplace, its new brand name for Future Workplace, a virtual desktop offering introduced in 2013. T-Systems Dynamic Workplace was introduced to address client needs for virtual desktop and mobility overall, based on a centralized approach to applications and data. T-Systems with this offering has taken sever[...]

Overall H1 HRO M&A activity is up year-over-year, and acquisition activity has increased in nearly all service lines except learning.   While learning M&A activity was high in H1 2013, this year, M&A activity in H1 2014 was strongest in the benefits administration market, and it’s occurring in both the U.S. and U.K. as vendors strengthen their DC contribution capability.&[...]

CSC recently briefed NelsonHall on its SAP Next-Gen offering, unveiled in June 2014. CSC’s SAP practice is relatively large within CSC (headcount 7.7k, ~10% of CSC’s overall 80k). CSC has recently engaged in a service portfolio refresh to increase its differentiation through more specialized SAP-related services. This differentiation relies on adoption of automation tools and enhanc[...]

Sopra recently updated NelsonHall on its application management (AM) capabilities. In 2013 Sopra generated ~€393m revenues from AM, or ~29% of its total revenues. The company is a top application management vendor in its domestic market, along with Accenture, Capgemini, Atos CGI, and IBM. Key AM clients of Sopra include Airbus, Orange, SFR, Crédit Agricole, EDF, Auchan, SNCF, BN Pariba[...]

IBM has patented a technique to allow users to dynamically choose or change the location where public and private cloud data is stored.This is clearly a very important development in legitimizing cloud use for production applications, where country and industry regulators can take a very strong view on the geographies in which data, particularly customer data, can be stored. Potentially th[...]

CSC has expanded its partnership with IBM to enhance its ability to offer hybrid cloud and mobility services. In particular, the partnership emphasizes CSC's continuation and development of its role as a cloud service integrator and manager, rather than as a direct provider of capital-intensive IaaS services. CSC has a large client base for traditional data center management, frequently using [...]

NelsonHall, the leading global BPO and IT outsourcing analyst firm, has today launched a new tool, the NelsonHall Self-Service Forecasting Tool” to assist organizations in downloading market forecasts customized to their business requirements. This new tool is aimed at assisting executives in accessing the precise market size, growth, and vendor share information they require rapidly and [...]

So why has Cognizant’s share price taken such a battering today, after such strong topline growth (16.5%, at the mid-point of prior guidance) and a non-GAAP operating margin of 21%, above the company’s target range of 19% to 20%? (see here). Quite simply because of the revised revenue guidance for 2014 from growth of at least 16.5% to at least 14%. This is a huge[...]

At first glance, its Q4 FY 2014 results look like another impressive quarter’s performance from HCL Technologies (HCL), with the strongest y/y topline growth since Q2 FY 12 (to 14/6%) and ongoing y/y margin improvement (to 24.1%). (See here for full details). Look more closely, however, and, while the performance is undoubtedly very strong, it tends to be concentrated in a few service lines [...]

The H1 results from the European majors Atos, Capgemini, Sopra, all France-headquartered, are now in - also those of Sopra, about to merge with Steria. So what does this tell us, about the progress of these firms and the state of the European market and what should we expect in H2 2014? The average constant currency revenue growth experienced by these firms in H1 2014 was 1.4% with Steria and S[...]

In addition to providing assessments of MPHRO vendor capability, the NelsonHall Evaluation and Assessment Tool (NEAT) for MPHRO, published July 29, 2014, http://bit.ly/1uDunOq supports an analysis of customer satisfaction within MPHRO by service line. Based on client interviews conducted globally covering vendors providing MPHRO across all regions, the analysis covers satisfaction within the [...]