As well as conducting extensive research into RPA and AI, NelsonHall is also chairing international conferences on the subject. In July, we chaired SSON’s second RPA in Shared Services Summit in Chicago, and we will also be chairing SSON’s third RPA in Shared Services Summit in Braselton, Georgia on 1st to 2nd December. In the build-up to the December event we thought we [...]

  Last week, NelsonHall attended the latest BPM Summit in Cape Town organized by BPeSA (Business Process enabling South Africa), the official trade body for the outsourcing and contact center industry in the Western Cape. The event provides an opportunity for potential investors, analysts, providers, and government officials to interact. Here I take a look at the appeal of South Africa[...]

  NelsonHall recently visited CSS Corp’s contact center in Chennai, India to learn more about its operations and its current focus on developing its premium technical support services. The center opened in July 2010, supports 28 clients (primarily in the high tech and telecoms sectors), and has ~2,200 employees providing customer care, technical support, premium technical support[...]

  Cigniti, and its subsidiary Gallop, recently launched Migrate 2 Selenium (M2S), a migration tool that reengineers automated test cases (test scripts) from software testing COTS such as HPE UFT, to open source software such as Selenium. The non-digital world uses commercial testing products Migrate 2 Selenium is not just another accelerator. We think the intention behind M2S, in[...]

  One of the top HR initiatives for organizations has been to replace legacy on-premise systems with cloud-based technology. In fact, as of Q4 2015, ~44% of organizations have moved core HR to the cloud according to PWC’s annual HR Technology Survey. This trend will not only continue, but will naturally expand to other HR functions, including payroll, followed by time and at[...]

  NIIT Technologies is undergoing significant change with its software and software product testing services, reflecting the impact of agile projects for building digital applications. We recently spoke with the head of their CoE for Agile and DevOps to find out more. NIIT Tech Embedding Testing Work in Agile Development Activities The iterative nature of agile requires test[...]

At a recent analyst and advisor event held at its Kiev, Ukraine delivery center, Luxoft showcased its offerings and experiences to demonstrate how it intends to achieve its stated goal of 20% CAGR revenue growth, taking it from $651m in the current fiscal to $1bn by the end of its FY18 (March 31, 2018). And though the word diversification wasn’t mentioned, it was evident that this is very mu[...]

  In recent years, the software development life cycle has become increasingly automated as IT service vendors seek to drive greater efficiencies in software development and maintenance, and increase their ability to scale. This is true for testing as well as for wider software development support. Initially, as elsewhere, the increasing automation of testing was based on the develo[...]

We recently talked to Diederik Vos and René Gawron, respectively CEO and CFO of SQS, to reflect on SQS’ financial H1 2016 performance and on strategic initiatives. Service Mix Transformation Impacts Revenue Growth in H1 2016 On the surface, the performance of SQS in H1 2016 was mixed: revenues were up 10.9% y/y but flat at constant currency/perimeter (CC/CP); and an adjusted PBT[...]

  NelsonHall’s recently published Payroll Outsourcing market analysis reveals that the Asia Pacific market is forecast to grow at 11% CAAGR to reach $1.2bn by 2020, which is approx. twice the rate of the overall market. Along with Latin America, APAC is the region seeing the highest growth, with increasing demand for outsourcing solutions in relatively immature markets. Growth is[...]

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[...]

  Over the last five years, banks have been focusing their operational investments and executive mindshare on compliance, and in this time the cost of compliance activities has increased ten-fold. Also, in the last three years, the focus for compliance has been on customer profile activities that utilize reference data – e.g. Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML),[...]

  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 [...]