Since his appointment as CEO of Infosys, a key message of Dr. Vishal Sikka has been that automation and AI are about the ‘amplification’ of the human, and that this has been true of technology for centuries. Here is one of many similar bold visionary statements made during his early months: “we see an opportunity to launch a great human revolution, where we are able to achieve mu[...]

At its recent Confluence client and stakeholder event, Infosys outlined its overall business strategy, based on the belief that BPO as it is delivered currently will be replaced by business process as a service (BPaaS) delivered on virtual stacks within a few years. Here I take a quick look at the Infosys vision and its application within financial services. Infosys described the transition to [...]

At Atos’ recent industry analyst event in Boston, the first time it had held such an event in the U.S., we expected the focus would be its expanded presence in the U.S. following its acquisition of Xerox’s ITO business last June, with an update on the integration, and plans for further development in the U.S. But this was a global rather than a regional event, and Atos had much more to[...]

On 23rd June, the people of the U.K. will have the opportunity to vote on whether or not to stay in the European Union (EU). But while the wider political debate surrounding a possible ‘Brexit’ rumbles on, what might be the impact on talent acquisition and the related outsourcing industry?  It’s still unclear what kind of agreement Britain and the EU would negotiate p[...]

It has been a year since private equity firm Everstone Capital purchased Aon Hewitt’s APAC payroll business. The most obvious change is the rebranding to Excelity Global, but behind the scenes, the company has been working hard to transform its payroll business to meet market demand. At the time of the acquisition, Excelity’s offering was focused solely on a full payroll services mo[...]

 2016 can be officially declared the year of the chatbot. For  the last few months the amount of attention from the media,  and from developers and venture capitalists, has turned chatbots from an ordinary customer service tool to a hyped  technology, tipped to replace apps and become the all-  encompassing digital interface  between customers and  brands. A[...]

Over the last few years, the global benefits market has continued to evolve as vendors have launched offerings to address the needs of multinationals. Essentially, there have been two main approaches: Providing global brokerage and consulting services Providing a global technology offering with optional local administration services. The global brokerage and consulting model has been [...]

At the Spring CLO Conference this week, a good deal of the focus was on learning at the beginning of the employee life cycle to improve quality of hire, increase employee retention, and reduce costs. Xerox presented on the theme of ‘Breaking Out of the Box: Engaging Your Pipeline Candidates Through Learning’, while Raytheon Professional Services (RPS) and K4 Consulting jointly presente[...]

In December 2015, we published two blogs about M&A activity in the IT services industry in 2015 (here are the links for Part 1 and Part 2). This blog examines M&A activity in IT services in Q1 2016 and sets our expectations for the rest of this year. In short, 2016 started off with a bang, with two very large IT services acquisitions announced in the first [...]

In the retail banking BPS market assessment I am currently undertaking, several key trends are emerging regarding which processes are being outsourced and why. Banks do not outsource all processes at once, and selecting the highest priority processes to outsource can be reduced to an analysis of two key dimensions: Margin: where profit margins are highest, usually with new processes or produ[...]

Self-service has long been part of the customer service mix, dating back to user manuals, and progressing to the first IVRs, website FAQs, and experience sharing communities such as Amazon Help. Even though self-service support has a wide range of benefits and savings for consumers and businesses, its adoption has been slow – due partly to technological limitations, and to a tendency to use [...]

At its Meeting of the Minds (MOTM) conference last week, ADP explained its focus on full provision of services, technology, and continuous innovation, and presented recent examples, including delivery of ~10m 1095 forms in the U.S. as part of ACA, deployment of a new ‘user experience’, and the launch of ADP Onboarding. Long-established as a provider of global payroll services, ADP also[...]

Financial institutions are seeking to deepen their operational capital in order to drive down cost of operations, increasing fixed cost and reducing variable cost (non-linear cost reduction). Here we look at two examples of how institutions are achieving this by partnering with third party operations vendors. Capital Markets Client with Broadridge In this example, Broadridge is providing a p[...]

Sopra Steria announced recently its 2015 results (click here for more information on the recent results). The results contained a number of surprises. Our key take-aways from the results are discussed below. Strong Financial Performance in French Operations in Spite of Merger Credit is due to Sopra Steria’s management in managing the rapid turnaround of Steria France in spite of i[...]

The utilities sector is an important one for HCL. The company has worked with ~100 utilities and currently has 25 active utilities clients, with its utilities revenue primarily from the U.S., U.K., and Australia. To focus further on this sector, HCL has enhanced its capability to offer end-to-end and BPaaS-based services through a number of partnerships and is now going to market targeting[...]

When you imagine how manufacturing companies might be making use of the Internet of Things (IoT), chances are the first image that comes to mind is of factory robots. These and SCADA systems have been providing remote monitoring and management systems for many years, well before the term IoT was coined. And, as you’d expect, manufacturers are integrating IoT-based solutions into their M2M sy[...]

It’s no secret that employee engagement levels remain low. Gallup found that the number of employees engaged in the U.S. remained at around 32% in 2015 (13% worldwide). Furthermore, over the last five years, employee engagement levels have remained relatively consistent, floating between 29% and 32%. While there are many reasons why employees are disengaged, organizations need to be proac[...]

TCS recently introduced 360 Degree Assurance (360), an AI-based IP, based on analyzing data gathered from several sources across the IT software development life-cycle. Current use cases cover defect root cause analysis and for test case optimization. 360 follows the introduction last year by TCS Assurance Services Unit (ASU) of NETRA, proprietary IP which helps automate the Dev-to-Ops cycle. N[...]

This is the first in a series of blogs looking at various aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT) market. Here I take a look at the use of IoT in the connected vehicle space, and at the shape of market potential. IoT can be used to build connected vehicle systems to enable: Vehicle-to-vehicle communication so that vehicles can update each other on road conditions, allow vehicles to proper[...]

At the end of 2015, private equity group Blackstone closed the purchase of Serco’s private sector BPO business for £250m (~$375m), and the company has now rebranded to its original name, Intelenet Global Services. Today, Intelenet employs ~55k staff across 66 delivery centers in eight countries, providing Customer Management Services (CMS), F&A, Knowledge Management, and ITO servic[...]