As part of NelsonHall’s series of reports focusing on the business priorities and digital initiatives of IT services buyers, we found that buyers in the transportation industry have a significant focus on improving the customer experience. Eighty-five percent of transportation companies are pursuing an operational objective of increasing average revenue per customer to a high extent, while 75% are pursuing enhancing customer experience to a high extent.

These companies are primarily looking to achieve these objectives through the adoption of digital technologies, with 82% of transportation companies believing that improving customer experience and customer satisfaction is a highly important benefit of digital. This focus also correlates with the most pursued areas for digital initiatives: customer service and online commerce & CRM, each cited as being pursued to a high extent by more than 60% of transportation companies.

To address these needs, NIIT Technologies has introduced a new framework that enables travel and hospitality companies to improve customer service and drive revenues through greater tailoring of services to individual customer needs. With years of stagnant revenues and the rise of low-cost competitors, NIIT Tech sees an opportunity for travel and hospitality companies to use personalization to change what can be a commoditized product (a plane seat or hotel room). NIIT Tech is positioned to understand and address these needs, as NelsonHall estimates ~55% of its digital transformation consulting revenues are associated with travel and hospitality clients.

NIIT Tech’s PACE framework (Personalization for enhanced Ancillary revenue and Customer Experience) uses an assessment of the maturity of current operations to plot current capabilities, determine the target level of maturity, and map the process for achieving it. PACE considers capabilities across two dimensions: personalization maturity and engineering proficiency:

• Personalization maturity spans from a 1:many model to a 1:1 model. It analyzes three elements to assess the use of data to tailor user experiences: system of insight, integration and channel enablement, and system of engagement
• Engineering proficiency uses NIIT Tech’s DONE framework to assess the internal technical delivery capabilities to plot companies from ‘predictable’ (with eight mature disciplines) to ‘lean startup’ (with 23 mature disciplines). Disciplines measured span areas including business value, solution, continuous delivery, agile practices, and support.

Delivered through a 4-week assessment project, the outputs are plotted to illustrate where a company’s maturity falls within one of four quadrants: naivete, contender, thinker, nirvana.

Based on the current positioning and the company’s objectives, a project plan is then developed for the company. These projects are planned to address the three layers that comprise the customer experience mentioned above:

• Systems of insight: the systems that capture customer data
• Integration and channel enablement: the systems that enable the use of captured data through the dissemination of the data to inform business operations
• System of engagement: the customer-facing user experience, informed by captured data fed through integrated environment.

These projects span all three layers as necessary. Though the entire project can require an 18 to 24-month commitment, NIIT Tech develops a project plan that includes delivering quick wins to demonstrate value, while the more challenging, lower direct ROI effort of building the foundational elements of the data capture and integration necessary to feed a tailored customer experience are completed.

PACE projects are supported by NIIT Tech’s ecosystem of partners, to align with the specific needs and preferences of clients, including UiPath, Appian, Sitecore, Salesforce, Adobe, Pega, Oracle, Tableau and others.

NIIT Tech’s experience to date has shown most travel and hospitality companies are low on the maturity cycle. But to achieve internal objectives, projects have had different types of focus, examples being:

• Transforming a website for a large airline to better use customer data
• Micro-services implementation to enable greater integration and channel enablement for a loyalty program
• Managed service for business intelligence services for an Asia-Pacific airline
• Implementation of a data lake for a large airline to expand analytics capability
• Transforming an e-commerce platform for an Asia-Pacific airline. This included both process and technology changes, with a significant focus on increased use of automation, that enabled the time to market for changes to fall from three weeks to less than three days. With further transformation, this is expected to fall to under four hours.

In travel and hospitality industries increasingly focused on a self-defeating cycle of lower and lower prices, personalization of experiences offers an opportunity to use digital to differentiate from competitors. NIIT Tech’s PACE offering has been developed to help these clients meet or exceed their customer needs. 

We now turn our attention to Dell Services, which has adopted an automation focus across its life and healthcare insurance BPS processes.

Focusing on healthcare payer & provider and life insurance process automation

In 2016, life insurance accounts for around 30% of Dell Services’ overall BPS revenues and healthcare payer accounts for approximately 35%, with healthcare provider making up the balance. Dell Services takes a platform-led approach to its BPS:

1. It has its own LifeSys platform for life insurance, on to which it migrates a client’s book of business and provides administration services in its own environment; or

2. It partners with a third party supplier for platform capability and tailors it to fit the needs of the book of business, from which it can then provide services, e.g. Dell Services uses partner ikaSystems for its healthcare payer platform needs, on top of which it layers its Dell Business Process Management Suite (DBPMS) tools. The tools include:

3. An enterprise dashboard: including KPI tracking and trend analysis for SLA metrics

4. Client extranet: including an issues log

5. Queue management: including skill-set based routing and priority allocation.

Automation Ideation led by BPS delivery teams

Unlike other providers, who tend to be led by their clients with respect to automation, the process at Dell  Services starts with an internal ‘ideas generation’ stage, achieved either through Dell’s ‘LEAP’ (Listen, Engage, Act, Progress) portal where agents are able to log ideas, together with perceived benefits (and are rewarded if their ideas are selected) or via the Business Process Improvement (BPI) team who carry out a ‘click study’ to identify ways in which the process could be re-engineered or automated. In line with its peers, an internal concern about increasing automation was the inevitable change in job composition; for this reason, the LEAP portal is considered particularly important to ensure employees are involved and engaged in driving the initiative forward. In addition, supervisors are targeted with an annual 5%-15% AFTE target. Once an idea has been selected, a feasibility study takes place before the idea is tested and bots are deployed by the central AFTE automation team. Bot management is then passed to the operations team while the bots are monitored through the central bot command center.

Balancing AFTEs with FTEs

In line with the market, Dell Services has concentrated its efforts on applying automation to high volume processes, which account for ~30% to 35% of its overall book of business. To achieve this, it is targeting the introduction of ~300-400 AFTEs year on year, though this is not a static number since clients are on-boarded throughout the year. The overall aim is to achieve around 6% productivity improvement per annum.

Although Dell Services does use third-party RPA platforms, it has developed its own “AFTE” platform incorporated within the Dell Business Process Management Platform. AFTE bots rather than third-party bots are typically deployed where the Dell BPMS platform is already being used or is to be used.

High volume processes (in which AFTEs are being used to varying extents) within each of Dell Services’ insurance services include:

• Life insurance:
  • Data entry and indexing: freeing up FTEs to carry out other activities such as policy holder services where less work is typically carried out by AFTEs – though this is something that Dell is looking to change and where Dell is investing in automation initiatives
  • Policy issuing: currently, the work is handled 50% by FTEs and 50% by AFTEs, with Dell seeking greater tool maturity before it is able to drive greater automation here
  • Premium accounting
• Healthcare payer:
  • In-bound calls: FTE-led
  • Adjustments: FTE-led
  • Adjudication: 50% AFTE, 50% FTE
  • Claim processing: FTE-led
  • Member enrolment: FTE-led
  • Provider maintenance: 50% AFTE, 50% FTE
• Healthcare provider:
  • File download: exclusively AFTE
  • Medical coding: 50% AFTE, 50% FTE
  • Change entry: FTE-led
  • Payment posting: AFTE-led
  • Credit balancing: 50% AFTE, 50% FTE
  • Accounts receivables: FTE-led

A simple example to illustrate some of the quantifiable benefits that have been achieved through automation can be seen through the work that took place to automate call center operations at one of Dell’s life insurance clients. Prior to the introduction of automation, call center agents were required to use a number of screens to capture customer information, which often resulted in comparatively low accuracy, and a high handling time. The system was not user-friendly and baseline training typically took around 10 weeks. Ultimately SLAs were being missed. To address this, Dell condensed the numerous screens into one screen and introduced rule-based processes to ensure no manual calculations were required to complete the form, unlike previously, where up to six manual calculations were required. As a result, AHT fell from 471 seconds to 374 and training took ~7 weeks, as opposed to 10. The quality of data capture increased from 88% to 95% and the average time taken to update notes fell from 110 seconds to 15 seconds¸ because the system was largely able to perform updates itself.

Plans to Implement Machine Learning within Dell BPM Platform

Over the last four years, Dell has extended its capabilities from simple script based-processing, to the development of AFTEs, including an associated AFTE command center. Going forward, the intention is to incorporate a self-learning capability, implement technologies such as NLP and machine learning within the Dell BPMS platform, and to secure end-to-end automation in the processes that are already largely being carried out by AFTEs, e.g. indexing.

A year later, EXL delivered full year 2014 revenues that beat revised non-GAAP guidance by $11.6m, finishing the year with 9% growth in Q4, bolstered by better than expected contribution from the recently acquired Overland Solutions (OSI, $12.2m, against the anticipated $10m).

By service type,

• The newly named Operations Management segment (formerly ‘Outsourcing’), continues to represent over three quarters of total revenue and was up 2.7% y/y, or 11% excluding disentanglement costs
• The ‘Analytics and Business Transformation’ segment delivered double digit topline growth every quarter, and 31.9% growth in 2014 overall, reaching $110.6m. EXL’s analytics services business grew 44% in 2014, and now account for 13% of revenue, or $66m. Including contributions from its latest acquisition, RPM Direct, EXL expects its analytics business to reach over $100m in annual revenue in 2015 (or ~20% of total revenue).

Though details of the ‘new EXL’ won’t be revealed until the Investor Day next week, the journey that has been made by EXL this year has been marked by three specialist acquisitions within seven months, the third announced only this week.

• The spending spree started off reasonably small, with Blue Slate Solutions last July for $7m. Blue Slate generates ~85% of its revenues from health insurers (including Medicare contractors) and brings with it a consulting framework that EXL is integrating into its BPO and healthcare technology and analytics capabilities. Blue Slate brought to EXL a specialist onshore staff with domain experience in the U.S. health insurance sector
• The October acquisition for $53m of OSI further added to EXL’s onshore delivery network in the U.S. and to its BPaaS offerings for P&C, particularly in workers’ compensation premium audits
  • These two acquisitions will bring in over $105m incremental revenue in 2015, more than offsetting the headwind of ~$49m from transitioning clients. As well as onshore resources, both have developed proprietary tools and frameworks to support their service delivery
• The third acquisition, yet to be completed, is of RPM Direct (for $47m in cash plus earn outs of up to $23m). RPM Direct will enhance EXL’s marketing analytics capabilities in U.S. insurance, across P&C, life and health segments. EXL had indicated a year ago that marketing and customer analytics are focus areas within its “Decision Analytics” services unit. RPM will broaden the range of services EXL can offer to insurance sector clients

All in all, EXL will have invested over $130m in these three acquisitions, all of which

• Boost its onshore presence in the U.S
• Bring in IP (tools, frameworks, marketing database)
• Bring in specialist domain capabilities in the health payer and other insurance sectors
• Broaden its U.S. client base.

Looking ahead to 2015, EXL has given revenue guidance of $570m to $590m, excluding any impact of RPM, a growth rate of 8.5% to 12.5%. Q1 is the last quarter where revenue headwinds from transitioning clients will have a significant effect.

EXL is developing analytics CoEs, particularly in support of healthcare and insurance and is expecting to sign a number of $10m plus annual revenue clients. Will we see further tuck-in acquisitions to further expand its capabilities in different areas of analytics for insurance and healthcare in 2015? The indications are that this is very possible.

EXL started emphasizing its analytics offerings around 18 months ago: at the time, much of the portfolio was based on India delivery. EXL today has a much richer portfolio to offer in its target verticals in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the U.K. , which accounts for over 20% of global revenues, delivered a strong year; EXL does not provide constant currency growth figures, but reported revenue growth for the U.K. in 2014 was 10%, all of which organic. Were EXL’s spending spree to continue into 2015, maybe U.K./EMEA will come higher up its investment priorities.

Finally, EXL has authorized a three-year $20m annual share repurchase program to offset share dilution from annual employee equity grants.

We note that EXL’s share price is at its highest for over two years and has surged by ~20% since the beginning of the month.

By Fiona Cox and Rachael Stormonth

NelsonHall will be producing its first ever Key Vendor Assesment on EXL in March.

Services within the scope of the offering include:

• Contract remediation
• Document review
• Consent order fulfillment
• Corporate compliance research.

MphasiS will be bringing the technology and process elements to the table, while Mindcrest will be providing the legal expertise.

This comes in an environment of increasing regulatory pressures for the BFSI sector, with organizations needing to implement and maintain stringent processes to reduce the level of risk, especially that of non-compliance.  For example, in the insurance sector, it was confirmed last month that Solvency II (the harmonization of EU insurance regulation) is now set to come into effect on January 1, 2016 – after the date has been pushed back on several occasions. In the last few years insurance companies have had to re-evaluate their regulatory framework under the three pillars of Solvency II:

• Their quantitative requirements for capital held
• Governance & risk management of insurers
• Transparency.

The risk management processes they need to implement and maintain include some activities that are provided by LPO players, paving the way for relationships between pure play LPOs and BPO provider who have an industry-specific focus in BFSI sectors. The need for compliance is related to regulatory changes, and LPOs are able to provide their clients with clarity over these constraints and ensure they operate within them.

LPO has been growing at exceptional rates since its breakthrough as a BPO offering in the late noughties - with more set to come as it is increasingly accepted within the legal industry. Within the LPO market, the ‘Legal Risk Management’ segment, driven by the demand for compliance and due diligence services, in one form or another, is growing at a rate  of over 20% CAAGR through 2018, making it the fastest growing segment, ahead of ‘Legal Cost Reduction’ and ‘Contract Centralization and Standardization’ (see NelsonHall LPO Market Analysis – to be published next week).

So, how are LPOs rising to the challenge?

By increasing client’s visibility into their contractual environment through use of obligations and opportunities tracking, contract remediation, regulatory mapping via legal research services and design of compliance programmes, to name a few.

A recent example of this is the contract win awarded at the start of the month to QuisLex by a manufacturing conglomerate to implement an anti-corruption and compliance program. QuisLex will be providing third-party due diligence to address ongoing FCPA obligations. It will do this by reviewing existing documents related to ~15k third parties.

Until now, LPOs have largely partnered with law firms, but this is likely to expand further and we can expect to see more partnerships between LPOs and other types of organization, like MphasiS; the partnership with Mindcrest is proof that MphasiS has followed through with its strategy to acquire or partner to increase the provision of niche services and capabilities.  MphasiS is not the only vendor with this on its agenda.. ! This example comes a year after the partnership announcement between Wipro and e-discovery provider DTI, for legal and compliance support services.

If we assume that the Mindcrest/MphasiS engagement is suitably representative (and we do), then Life Sciences will be the next sector to be heavily targeted, after Financial Services – which is currently the main focus of this offering. NelsonHall predicts that Oil & Gas and Energy & Natural Resources will be the next sectors to follow suit – in the LPO world, these industries are already the next big thing on the agenda with the likes of Clutch Group developing an Energy & Natural Resources-specific practice. The focus will then spread beyond highly regulated industries and move into areas such as manufacturing and technology.

To that end, it is safe to say that the provision of compliance services will soon no longer be considered a competitive advantage, but a critical success factor for survival.

• Contract remediation
• Document review
• Consent order fulfillment
• Corporate compliance research.

MphasiS will be bringing the technology and process elements to the table, while Mindcrest will be providing the legal expertise.

This comes in an environment of increasing regulatory pressures for the BFSI sector, with organizations needing to implement and maintain stringent processes to reduce the level of risk, especially that of non-compliance.  For example, in the insurance sector, it was confirmed last month that Solvency II (the harmonization of EU insurance regulation) is now set to come into effect on January 1, 2016 – after the date has been pushed back on several occasions. In the last few years insurance companies have had to re-evaluate their regulatory framework under the three pillars of Solvency II:

• Their quantitative requirements for capital held
• Governance & risk management of insurers
• Transparency.

The risk management processes they need to implement and maintain include some activities that are provided by LPO players, paving the way for relationships between pure play LPOs and BPO provider who have an industry-specific focus in BFSI sectors. The need for compliance is related to regulatory changes, and LPOs are able to provide their clients with clarity over these constraints and ensure they operate within them. 

LPO has been growing at exceptional rates since its breakthrough as a BPO offering in the late noughties - with more set to come as it is increasingly accepted within the legal industry. Within the LPO market, the ‘Legal Risk Management’ segment, driven by the demand for compliance and due diligence services, in one form or another, is growing at a rate  of over 20% CAAGR through 2018, making it the fastest growing segment, ahead of ‘Legal Cost Reduction’ and ‘Contract Centralization and Standardization’ (see NelsonHall LPO Market Analysis – to be published next week).

So, how are LPOs rising to the challenge?

By increasing client’s visibility into their contractual environment through use of obligations and opportunities tracking, contract remediation, regulatory mapping via legal research services and design of compliance programmes, to name a few.

A recent example of this is the contract win awarded at the start of the month to QuisLex by a manufacturing conglomerate to implement an anti-corruption and compliance program. QuisLex will be providing third-party due diligence to address ongoing FCPA obligations. It will do this by reviewing existing documents related to ~15k third parties.

Until now, LPOs have largely partnered with law firms, but this is likely to expand further and we can expect to see more partnerships between LPOs and other types of organization, like MphasiS; the partnership with Mindcrest is proof that MphasiS has followed through with its strategy to acquire or partner to increase the provision of niche services and capabilities.  MphasiS is not the only vendor with this on its agenda.. ! This example comes a year after the partnership announcement between Wipro and e-discovery provider DTI, for legal and compliance support services. 

If we assume that the Mindcrest/MphasiS engagement is suitably representative (and we do), then Life Sciences will be the next sector to be heavily targeted, after Financial Services – which is currently the main focus of this offering. NelsonHall predicts that Oil & Gas and Energy & Natural Resources will be the next sectors to follow suit – in the LPO world, these industries are already the next big thing on the agenda with the likes of Clutch Group developing an Energy & Natural Resources-specific practice. The focus will then spread beyond highly regulated industries and move into areas such as manufacturing and technology.

To that end, it is safe to say that the provision of compliance services will soon no longer be considered a competitive advantage, but a critical success factor for survival.

Initially the partners will work together to improve quality of community healthcare in Suffolk, with Bromley Healthcare acting in an advisory capacity and supporting clinical leaders. In the long term, they intend to join forces to bid for a range of opportunities in community services and integrated care across the UK.

This move is part of Serco's drive to enhance the quality of its healthcare services in Suffolk after the service came underfire when  NHS commissioners, reportedly, found it missing targets. Improving the quality of services is key to Serco's ambitions to grow its healthcare business. Major recent contract wins have included the troubled £140m Suffolk Community Health contract, won in 2012 and the £120m Anglia Support Partnership, awarded in 2011.

•     Revenue was £555.3m  
•     EBIT was £28.1m, a margin of 5.1%.

Comparisons with the prior year were not provided as the company in its present from came into being in August 2012. For the new company, for the five weeks to the end of 2012 FY, revenue was £49.9m, EBIT, £1.1m and a margin of 2.2%.  

Prior to the financial restructuring in August 2012, Mouchel made an operating loss.

Mouchel Business Services (MBS) results were:

• Revenues were £167m, in a challenging local authority market
• EBIT of £5.3m and margin of 3.2%.

The restructuring which started in early 2012 was completed at the end of March 2013.

Over the priod, Mouchel has reported > £1bn contract wins. These were mostly in its construction and infrastructure business. In its BPO business the company won a three-year, £50m, contract extension for the provision of business and ancillary services with the Unity Partnership, its JV with Oldham Council. It also also won a place on the North West Pensions Framework in July 2013.

In this period Mouchel also completed the acquisition of the 50% share of its joint venture, EnterpriseMouchel, a UK-based infrastructure support services company.

The company reported:

• Order book of £2bn up from £1.7bn at the year-end matches 2008 level, the highest in Mouchel’s 125-year history.
• Strong pipeline of opportunities worth £2.1bn
• Leads and prospects amount to over £5bn.

Mouchel’s finances have bounced back well since its restructuring in August 2012. The infrastructure business has seen the bigger share of growth, unsurprisingly, with an uptick in the construction and infrastructure markets.

Mouchel continues to face tough conditions in its local government business. It sees growth opportunities in other sectors; in particular it will be targeting the universities sector with its established brand in the outsourcing market and its BPO expertise. It is also looking to leveradge its pensions administration expertise in the private sector.

• Revenue was $1,331m, up 26.8% as stated.
• Operating income was $188.2m, a margin of 14.1%, up 200 bps.

FY 2013 revenue (and growth) by segment was:

• Health Services $862.9m (+28.6%)
• Human Services $468.4m (+23.6%).

FY 2013 operating income and margin by segment was:

• Health Services $129.8m, 15%, up 300 bps
• Human Services $58.1, 12.4% down 60 bps

On the face of it, Maximus' results tell a tale of two halves with the healthcare business substantially outperforming the human services business in revenue and profitability. Maximus puts the decline in Human Services' operating income down to a windfall which bumped up revenue and income in Q2 but which has been excluded from the full year results. Excluding this terminated contract, full year revenue grew 19% to $452.4m compared to the fiscal 2012, principally thanks to the U.K. Work Programme, the U.K, Saudi Arabia government employment services contract and the PSI acquisition.

In the Health Segment, Maximus expects some revenue attrition, coming from:

• The initial surge of work related to ACA contracts is likely to level off and
• The Minnesota HIX contract is currently winding down
• The California Healthy Families CHIP program ended in fiscal 2013.

However, some other contracts are ramping up:

• The federal eligibility appeals contract
• Maximus is also working on enrollment as a subcontractor to General Dynamics in the federal health marketplace, operating two of the 17 customer contact centers under that contract.

Another major contract award in this period by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Federal Student Aid is currently under protest from a competitor.

While continuing to do well in the U.S, Maximus is also eying growth in the U.K. The acquisition of Health Management Ltd  in July positions Maximus well for opportunities coming from the expansion of the DWP's work capability assessments contracts as well as primary care opportunities in the NHS market, including: physiotherapy, chiropractic, osteopathy and podiatry specialists, as well as counselling and psychology services, dental care and travel vaccinations and immunizations.

Capita is offering the cloud service at a cost that is 30% less than its existing prices and, according to Capita, cheaper than an Amazon virtual instance when buying multiple instances. Through the VCE partnership Capita is looking to provide clients access to pre-tested approaches to migrating applications to its cloud environment.

The initial infrastructure as a service offering will be extended in the next 12-18 months to include PaaS for CRM and ERP deployments, as well as SaaS, when Capita will offer more and more of its own software on a SaaS basis on its own private cloud. These will feature the next-generation of its software portfolio.

The move to cloud by Capita was necessary for it to keep up with the market trend to cut infrastructure costs through shared capabilities and utility computing. It also enhances Capita's ability to offer ongoing cost savings in its contracts as well as improving its terms in a highly competitive market. Cloud was the right lever for Capita to pull, given increasing competition from Indian-centric vendors such as TCS in its main public sector market. When it comes to offshoring, Capita's delivery capability is still relatively small, <10% of Capita IT Services workforce compared with >80% of some of its competition.

If Capita had any doubts about the suitability of the cloud model in its key public sector market, this would have been completely dispelled when the U.K. central government adopted a cloud first procurement policy earlier this year. The policy extends to health and defence and indirectly to local government, Capita’s biggest client base.

Overall, this is a positive step by Capita. Likely benefits to the business include:

• Ability to support its BPO offerings on its own cloud
• Help with year-on-year cost efficiencies in existing contracts, not only in the public sector but in all its markets including financial services, retail and utilities
• Provides Capita the opportunity to leverage its well-known brand and existing contract base in the U.K. to cross-sell cloud services and related consultancy
• Overcome any lingering market perceptions that it is mostly a BPO and not an ITO provider
• Compete better with major ITO suppliers, such as HP,Atos and Capgemini, which have made huge investments in their data centers and cloud capabilities and which are also targeting the cloud service brokerage, integration and orchestration services.

Capita's own recent investments in its infrastructure include:

• Two Capita Command and Control Centers (C4), one in Pune, India, and a mirror site in the U.K.
• A co-located  continuity site for its main two data centers in the U.K.
• The acquisition of Northgate Managed Services, which was a key enabler of this move. NMS already operated a cloud service for schools with a large presence in Northern Ireland, including a delivery center in Belfast.

Lockheed Martin's IS&GS business has been affected by sequestration in its core U.S. public sector market and is clearly looking for growth elsewhere by expanding into new geographies and sectors.

A successful U.K. business such as Amor fits the bill well.  Amor had an impressive year in 2012, with revenues growing 27% organically to £57.2m and an EBITDA margin of 14.16%. Amor brings to IS&GS vertical and civilian products with an established presence and synergies in target markets. In particular, Amor's airport operations products will complement IS&GS’ civilian pilot training capabilities that it acquired in 2011 with Sim Industries.

The restructuring of NPS division last year, to focus more on services, combined with a number of contracts starting in 2012 helped improve NPS revenue. Contracts that started in 2012 include:

• The Blue Badge Improvement Scheme
• Athena - the managed service for data sharing by Essex Police and six other forces

NPS is also more agressively marketing its housing software internationally, reporting expansion in New Zealand, Australia and Canada, though no growth data was provided.

NPS' £170m contract with C2k to provide an Education Cloud for all schools in Northern Ireland was a major win for the company. Other contributors to the division's revenue improvements include managed services contracts with mid-market customers in the UK, including Christian Aid, Almac, Doosan, Wolseley, AAH Pharmaceuticals and the Driver and Vehicle Agency in Northern Ireland.

Capita's selection as a preferred supplier for a £175m, 12-year deal by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to provide Smart Meter Infrastructure Management came as a surprise. "Smart metering will be the biggest step change in the retail energy sector since the industry was privatized, more than 25 years ago” Capita’s chief executive, commented Paul Pindar. That goes for Capita's presence in the utility sector too.

The company did not have a presence in the utility sector until it acquired Northgate Managed Services (NMS) in February 2013. Furthermore, Capita is not known for large scale IT infrastructure services. Capita talked to NelsonHall about Northgate Managed Services (NMS) having clients in the utility sector at the time of the acquisition and no doubt NMS has enhanced Capita’s ability to manage the infrastructure. Capita is still very likely to work with partners extensively to manage the national scale of requirements.

Preferred suppliers for DECC's other smart metering supporting contracts were also announced today:

• CGI (formerly Logica) for the Data Service Provider (DSP) contract to manage the volumes of transactional data, in an 8-years deal worth ~£75 million.
• Telefonica for the Communications Service Provider (CSP) for the central and southern regions, in a contract worth ~ £1.5bn over 15 years.
• Arqiva for CSP the northern region, a contract worth ~ £625m over 15 years.

NelsonHall will cover the awards in more detail when the contracts have been finalized.

NelsonHall's analysis of NMS' acquisition published in February 2013: http://www.nelson-hall.com/research-programs/tracking-service/industry-insight-database/?avpage-views=article&id=77391&fv=2