Andy Lee, Alorica founder and CEO, shared with me last summer that his goal was to become the number one CMS vendor (by revenue) serving N. America. Well, now he is closing in on that goal, with Alorica entering into a stock purchase agreement to acquire Expert Global Solutions (EGS). With EGS, we estimate Alorica’s pro forma 2015 North American revenues are ~$1.8bn, closing the re[...]

In August 2015, we asked ‘Is CGI Ready to Pull the Acquisition Trigger?’It’s been four years CGI’s last big acquisition (Logica), and CGI watchers are still waiting to see what big move CGI will make next. Here I take a look at what’s driving CGI’s growth plans, and what we should expect next. As a consolidator, CGI positions on taking a long-term strategic v[...]

NelsonHall recently had a discussion with the head of the Integrated Engineering Services (IES) unit of Tech Mahindra regarding its 2016 acquisition of Pininfarina (along with parent company Mahindra & Mahindra). Turin-based Pininfarina is an icon in the world of automotive design, having serviced the likes of Ferrari for 80 years. It is a company of relatively limited size (€87m in 2015 [...]

Yesterday evening provided what was possibly the biggest surprise in the IT services industry for some time: the news that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is spinning off its Enterprise Services business via a Reverse Morris Trust (RMT) to HPE shareholders, for the business to be able to merge with CSC in a tax-efficient manner. Firstly, here are a few of the details of the transaction, which [...]

NelsonHall recently visited Sitel at their contact center in Chennai to experience operations at first hand and to discuss the evolving CMS outsourcing industry. Only five months ago, in December 2015, the South Indian floods hit Chennai and access to the Sitel center was blocked. Over 70 employees stayed behind in the office at Ramanujam IT Park, where the company provided beds and food, while tr[...]

Much of the current buzz in the industry continues to be centered on RPA, a term currently largely synonymous with automation, and this technology clearly has lots of life left in it, for a few years at least. Outside service providers, where its adoption is rapidly becoming mature, RPA is still at the early growth stage in the wider market: while a number of financial services firms have already [...]

KellyOCG held its second annual analyst event in Chicago last week. The event covered KellyOCG’s full suite of HR service offerings, but here I take a closer look at MSP and RPO and specifically at the advisory and analytics services that are driving growth in these areas. KellyOCG is the outsourcing and consulting group of Kelly Services Inc., and represents the largest growth segment of[...]

Next year will mark Capgemini’s 50th anniversary, and it is looking to its U.S. operations to spearhead a reinvention as a next generation IT and business process services provider, one where it positions as an innovator that is bold and capable of acting at speed in helping clients optimize and disrupt the way they do business. This is reflected in an aspirational statement for th[...]

Cielo held its annual RPO analyst event at its Milwaukee headquarters and service center last week. Cielo is one of the leading RPO providers in terms of revenue, number of hires, candidate focus, talent management focus, and global growth. It made 134k hires in 2015, with 130 clients in 69 countries. And with the addition of its newest service center in Buenos Aires, Cielo now has delivery center[...]

Accenture recently briefed NelsonHall on its new Omni-Channel Testing Platform (OCTP), an accelerator that sits at the intersection of Accenture’s Digital and Testing businesses. This is a reflection of the fact that software testing services are no longer confined to custom applications and COTS, but are now well integrated into the digital world, a process that started some three to four y[...]

NelsonHall has recently attended both the WNS analyst session in New York and Infosys Confluence in San Francisco. It may seem trite to suggest that their chosen locations reflect the differing approaches to the market being taken by the two firms, but there are some parallels. Sector domain focus While Infosys is taking a horizontal approach to taking emerging technologies to the next level[...]

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 [...]