NelsonHall recently attended an HP Enterprise Services (HP ES) analyst and adviser event in London focused on its European BPO business - on what was the first working day of its FY 2015. The tone was very upbeat: FY 2014 was a good year, with HP ES winning 11 out of the 12 BPO deals for which it bid, for an overall TCV of $1bn+ And management described its pipeline for FY 15 as “[...]

This is the final in a series of short blogs that look at various disruptive forces and their impact on BPO. The impact of all these disruptive factors is that BPO is now changing into something that the client has always wanted namely “High Velocity BPO”. In its early days, BPO was a linear and lengthy process with knowledge transfer followed by labor arbitrage, followed by process[...]

Randstad Sourceright Analyst Day 2014: RPO In High Gear Last week Randstad Sourceright held its first analyst event. Services covered included MSP, independent contractor solutions, technology, RPO, employer branding, veterans hiring initiatives, and career transition services. My focus here is primarily on Randstad Sourceright's RPO activity. RPO in High Gear In 2014 YTD Rand[...]

In our discussion, we’ve missed out lots of fashionable disruptors like mobile and cloud and these are indeed important elements within BPO. However, let’s be more futuristic still and consider the impact of the Internet of Things. Some examples of current deployment of the Internet of Things are as follows  Sector  Examples [...]

IBM recently held its annual IBM Alliances event, focusing on SAP and Oracle (other major IBM-wide partners include Microsoft, Infor, Cisco, Juniper Networks and Citrix). IBM Alliances manages major relationships with technology vendors that cross several IBM service lines, e.g. GBS, GTS, Systems & Technology, and Software. Those seven major partnerships are significant and command ~15% of ove[...]

BPO has always depended on partnerships with third-party software providers to provide supplementary platforms around client core systems to provide specialist functionality in areas like procurement, collections, & reconciliation handling. However, there is a danger that this can lead to a Heath Robinson (or Rube Goldberg) combination of applications, involving expensive software or SaaS[...]

There has always been a big divide between those suppliers that are comfortable handling voice and those suppliers that were comfortable handling data with very few comfortable with both. However, the impact of digital is such that it increases the need for voice and data convergence. A common misconception in customer service is that the number of transactions is going down. It isn’t, it[...]

There’s another disruptive force in BPO that no-one likes to talk about. It’s called labor arbitrage. Everyone is keeping a bit quiet about this one. It’s nothing like as sexy as robotics, or analytics, or SMAC, but it’s also a disruptive force. One side of labor arbitrage within labor arbitrage is relatively defensive, but in spite of automation and robotics, mature &ld[...]

Robotics has moved incredibly fast over the past year, but so has analytics. Analytics has been around in support of process improvement initiatives & Lean Six sigma projects for many years. It has also been present in areas like fraud analytics, which means at a personal level that you now have to re-instate your credit card most weeks. However, analytics is now becoming much more pervasiv[...]

Changes in banks’ regulatory capital requirements for businesses are leading banks to exit or downsize lines of business and increase the focus on other lines of business. Payments is an area where banks and non-banks are significantly increasing their commitments. Over the next five years the payments industry will change its entire shape, structure, and offerings. In the past, the complexi[...]

This blog is the first of seven in a series looking at six disruptive forces and their implications for BPO. Some of these are widely talked about, others less so. This first blog sets the scene and looks at the impact of robotics. Subsequent blogs will consider the implications of: Analytics  becoming all-pervasive and increasingly predictive Labor arbitrage is dead – long live l[...]

As reported in NelsonHall’s 2014 RPO market analysis, with a global shortage of talent predicted for the foreseeable future, RPO buyers will continue to seek specialists to attract candidates through the use of social networks and to create a pipeline of passive candidates (i.e. talent communities) to improve speed, quality of hire and retention of talent. Nine out of 10 companies in the [...]

This week NelsonHall held its quarterly IT outsourcing (ITO) Index webcast. We have conducted these calls for the last six years to monitor developments in ITO from a quantitative perspective. When we introduced the Index, ITO had largely moved from full outsourcing to a selective outsourcing approach, and Indian vendors were deploying their land and expand strategy with the occasional one-off meg[...]

Virtusa recently briefed NelsonHall on its gamification approach within its software testing offering. Virtusa is a fast growing offshore (India and Sri Lanka) oriented service provider. Its FY 2014 (year ended March 31, 2014) revenues were $397m, a growth of 19%. This followed growth of 20% in FY 2013 and 27% in FY 2012. The company has just over 8k employees. Founded in 1996 and headquartered[...]

Xerox Services Q3 Results: Any Signs of Progress? Xerox Services, now 57% of total Xerox Group revenues, is critical to the future of Xerox: it is its engine for future growth.We have been waiting for a better quarter for some time, but Q3 was not a stellar quarter for Xerox Services. Revenues Flat and Signings Down, with ITO the weakest link Xerox Services revenues in 2014 YTD are flat &[...]

This is the last set of quarterly results Unisys under the leadership of Ed Coleman – and it has been a last hurrah: Revenues were $883, up 11% y/y, up 10% in constant currency: the strongest quarter of growth for many years at Unisys Operating income was $77m, an operating margin of 8.7%, up 570 bps from a margin of 3.0% in Q3 2013. Significantly, the topline gro[...]

In his latest monthly newsletter, U.K. money-saving guru Martin Lewis gives his readers advice on how to make money from filling in online surveys. I rather like his opening line, which reads “Willing to give views on One Direction, washing-up liquid or what goes on between your bedsheets? If so, it's possible to earn £100s a year, without any special skill or talent.” Of [...]

NelsonHall’s latest CMS market analysis focuses on the increasing importance of transformational CMS, whereby a vendor not only takes over the running of a client’s call center processes, but seeks to optimize these processes to achieve the desired business goals of the organization. In the current market, the need to reduce cost while maintaining or enhancing customer satisfaction [...]

So far, 2014 has been a mixed year for Quindell; it faced damning speculation from Gotham City Research in April (which has since been rejected) and a failed partnership with the RAC in September, which would have seen ingenie’s telematics services being made available to all drivers, not just 17 to 25 year olds, from July. On the plus side, there has also been a number of signi[...]

Last week we looked at Infosys' quarterly results. It has been another busy week of quarterly reports from some of the Indian oriented service providers. How did five of them do? Syntel (Q3 CY14): Softness in Healthcare Greater than Expected Revenue was $228.3m, up 8.8% y/y, but slightly below consensus Operating margin was 29.8%, down 610 bps y/y, with less benefit from rupee depre[...]