This week saw the news that Cognizant will be acquiring Norwegian oil and gas services group Akastor’s IT and BPO captive Frontica Business Solutions for NOK1,025m (~$128m). Frontica’s staffing business Frontica Advantage is not a part of the transaction. In 2015, Frontica generated revenues of NOK 4,919m (~$610m), down 14.5% y/y. 2016 has seen further market softening and Q2 2016 r[...]

  Atos (which some years ago was at risk of itself being consolidated), is today one of the more effective consolidators in the IT services industry, with impressive experience of taking on challenging low-margin (or loss-making) businesses and turning them around in super quick time. Last week, just 14 months after its acquisition of the IT outsourcing business of Xerox Corp, Atos [...]

  From January 1st 2017, Xerox will separate its business process services (BPS) business into a public company called Conduent (trading under the ticker CNDT on NYSE). Conduent will have approximately ~$7bn revenue and over 96k employees. I recently spoke with Chuck Koskovich, Executive Vice President Customer Care Services at Xerox Services, about the implications of the split o[...]

HCL Technologies’ (HCL) twitter hashtag for its recent adviser and analyst event in Sweden was #HCLBigLeap, which led us to expect to hear some big news items. The jam-packed sessions did provide an overview of many recent and current developments – but the big news item was finally disclosed in an individual blog the following day (more of which later). We heard from many clients a[...]

In the third and final blog in the series examining the benefits administration market, I take a quick look at what health & welfare (H&W) services vendors have done recently to improve the participant experience. Historically, choice within employer-sponsored health plans has been limited, and the need to provide an engaging participant experience was non-existent. Employers’[...]

  ADP’s recent annual Analyst Day was held at its new Innovation Lab in Pasadena, California, with CEO Carlos Rodriquez and others articulating ADP’s strategy and vision for its clients. Top of Rodriquez’s list of priorities was the ability to meet the global talent needs of clients, the importance of which was underscored by several client presentations, including on[...]

NelsonHall attended the IBM Forum for Financial Services event in New York this past week, which focused on how bank customers are using IBM’s cognitive offerings. IBM has been investing heavily in services and technologies to enable deeper insight into financial institutions’ customers, starting 18 months ago with the development of Watson-based analytic assets. IBM’s the[...]

  At SE2’s Partnership Forum in Boston last week, the main theme was ‘FutureProof’, and specifically how to prepare and guard your company from regulatory and operational uncertainties. In effect, the life and annuities insurance BPS vendor is future proofing itself by investing heavily in its infrastructure, middleware, and platform capabilities to address its own fu[...]

NelsonHall’s Targeting Benefits Administration Services market analysis report, which will be published later this month, finds that the top driver for organizations outsourcing benefits administration is to improve the participant experience. Accordingly, both retirement and health & welfare (H&W) services vendors have been investing heavily in their respective areas to enhance [...]

The explosion of connected devices and IoT products promises a greater volume of technical support interactions and increased customer demand for proactive and always-on assistance through the lifecycle of a product. In turn, these requirements force customer experience (CX) providers to be involved with the product manufacturers at new levels, participating in development and testing, sales g[...]

Unsurprisingly, given its investment in, and focus on, Watson, IBM declared at a recent Alliances Analyst Day that 2016 is 'the year of cognitive'. The intent of the meeting was to look broadly at how IBM is working with its key alliance partners, including SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, and it is clear that IBM’s focus is on incorporating cognitive capabilities and broadening th[...]

In this, the first of three blogs on the current benefits administration outsourcing market, I take a brief look at what’s been happening in H1 2016. Benefits administration accounted for ~40% of HRO contract activity in the first half of 2016, with a heavy emphasis on renewals and contract extensions. Approximately 90% of contracts were from private sector organizations, with a stron[...]

Over the last few months, I have held discussions with a number of leading customer management services (CMS) vendors and their clients regarding the increasing need for advanced analytics to drive step changes in customer experience (CX). Here, I reflect on the changing role of analytics as they take centre stage as the key to disruptive CX. How times have changed When I first participa[...]

  NelsonHall estimates the Smart Energy IoT outsourcing market to be worth ~$260m in 2016, sitting third behind the Connected Car and Smart Manufacturing IoT markets. Smart Energy is of major importance, with government policy around the world strongly influencing its widespread adoption, and here I take a brief look at the background of the Smart Energy IoT market, and at some of the [...]

  Mid-market adoption of Managed Service Provider (MSP) programs is seeing high growth driven by the increasing need to manage costs, along with greater uptake of the direct hire MSP model (which is more common in mid-market organizations where there is a limited need to use specialist agencies). Here I take a brief look at the launch of a new mid-market MSP offering from Allegis Globa[...]

I attended Cognizant’s biannual analyst event in New York recently and spoke with their head of blockchain consulting. Cognizant has been investing heavily in services and technologies to enable the digital enterprise, including the blockchain technology stack. Eighteen months ago, Cognizant began developing blockchain assets based on various open source frameworks, and today they have o[...]

A bumper summer for NEAT vendor evaluation projects across HRO, Insurance BPS, Banking BPS, CMS, and IT Services. Plus news of NelsonHall's Buyer Intelligence Group. Many businesses experience a lull during holiday season, but for NelsonHall, summer 2016 has been non-stop, with the release of seven NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation & Assessment Tool (NEAT) projects in June, July, and August.[...]

  Employer branding has become an integral component of an effective talent strategy. It is synonymous with a company’s reputation as an employer, portraying the image of what the company is like to work for. The purpose of properly conveying and clearly communicating an employer’s brand is essential to attract, engage, develop, and retain the best talent for an organizatio[...]

To most non-testing experts, software testing services are a dull but necessary activity, whose main driver for growth has been the creation of testing factories in India. And yes, there is a significant element of this. At NelsonHall, we continue to be surprised by software testing service providers’ ever expanding service portfolio, the level of investment in proprietary accelerators t[...]

On 22nd August, Teleperformance announced the acquisition of interpretation services provider LanguageLine Solutions (LLS) for $1.52bn. LanguageLine was founded in 1982 and is headquartered in Monterey, California. In 2015 it had revenues of $388m and adjusted EBITDA of $147m, and the company is expected have revenues of between $400m and $450m in 2016. It has ~8k interpreters, 92% of whom&[...]