The acquisition of this facility is in line with Capgemini’s Latin America expansion strategy, and also supports client needs in support of global finance operations by providing a full-range of finance and accounting (F&A) services from global delivery centers. More than 200 employees will transfer to Capgemini and will continue to support the F&A and Human Resources Outsourcing (HRO) needs of Capgemini clients globally and in the Latin America region.

“With the acquisition of this new Brazilian center as well as the establishment of our other Latin American centers, Capgemini continues to expand our global delivery capabilities, with the potential for more than 2,000 seats in the region,” said David Poole, vice president and head of Americas Business Process Outsourcing, Capgemini. “We’re leveraging Capgemini’s unique approach, which utilizes business insight methods and solutions, combined with our deep knowledge of the F&A market, to service our clients, including several multinational businesses, allowing us to drive efficiencies and yield significant cost savings for our clients’ businesses.”

This Brazilian center was opened in 2007 in Gaspar, aiming to provide technology solutions to Sonda Procwork’s customers located in the region. The operation started with the deployment of SAP ERP, Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) and BPO services to a large company in the area.

“We have made a strategic decision to transfer BPO operations and the facility to Capgemini as of January 2010, using initially the same structure, same team and current work methods, which will cause minimal impact to our clients and to the people involved,” said Carlos Henrique Testolini, president, Sonda Procwork. “The activities related to SAP and ITO services currently performed in the center will be transferred to other units of Sonda Procwork in Sao Paulo, Alphaville and Campinas, ensuring continuity and quality of services provided to our clients.”

About Sonda Procwork

Sonda Procwork, a company of the Sonda Chilean group, started to operate in Brazil as a new brand of the company after the merger with Procwork Group in June 2007. The union of these companies represents, within the country, a world with more than 6 thousand employees and 800 active clients in 31 offices located all over the Brazilian states.

Operating for 20 years in Brazil, Sonda Procwork holds one of the largest ranges of offers in IT solutions such as Full IT Outsourcing, BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) CSC (Shared Services Center), licensing and implementation of SAP, automation software applications for taxes, foreign trade and management of legal cases, software factory, Data Center and Device Utility, network security, NOC (Network Operation Center), Service Desk e Field Services. The company has certified CMM level 2 in its software factory units and ISO 9001 in the field of both meeting and supporting SAP customers, and also in the software factory, in addition to several awards and certificates of services quality achieved in recent years.

Sonda is the largest Latin American company regarding IT services with business in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. From the new structure with the Sonda Procwork, the company has more than 12 thousand employees, 62 offices, more than 2.4 thousand active clients and is considered the fourth largest IT Company in Latin America, only competing with global companies, according to IDC (Interactive Data Corporation). Sonda trades its shares on the Stock Exchange of Santiago (Chile) and holds a stock of over US$ 1 billion.

More information is available at www.sondaprocwork.com.br or www.sonda.com.

About Capgemini

Capgemini, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, enables its clients to transform and perform through technologies. Capgemini provides its clients with insights and capabilities that boost their freedom to achieve superior results through a unique way of working, the Collaborative Business Experience(TM). The Group relies on its global delivery model called Rightshore(R), which aims to get the right balance of the best talent from multiple locations, working as one team to create and deliver the optimum solution for clients. Present in more than 30 countries, Capgemini reported 2009 global revenues of EUR 8.4 billion (approximately USD $11.6 billion) and employs 95,000 people worldwide.

More information is available at www.us.capgemini.com.

Rightshore(R) is a trademark belonging to Capgemini

Capgemini’s expertise is recognized in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) with a solution portfolio that spans Finance & Accounting, Customer Care & Intelligence, Procurement, Assurance Management Human Resources and Knowledge Process Outsourcing services. As part of Capgemini’s Rightshore(R) delivery network, BPO professionals provide services to clients worldwide 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in 36 languages, from centers located in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Guatemala, India, Poland, and the United States.

For more information: http://www.capgemini.com/services/outsourcing/bpo/.

Rightshore(R) is a trademark belonging to Capgemini.

SOURCE: Capgemini

Capgemini Jill Wilmot, +1-734-624-0519 jill.wilmot@capgemini.com or Sonda Procwork IMAGE Comunicacao Dani Portela, +55-11-5072-9960 daniportela@imagecomunicacao.com.br

We’ve assembled a panel to examine the key market trends impacting enterprise architecture (EA) in different regions of the world. We’ll evaluate how the use and value of EA is emerging and progressing worldwide, and how the expanding use of EA offers a unique window into global business trends as well.

Coming to you from last week’s The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Boston, the experts here share their knowledge on several developing and mature markets, as well as present a focus on China. We’ll hear about the cultural barriers and/or accelerants for EA adoption from region to region.

Here to help better understand the role of EA as it bestrides the globe, please welcome Allen Brown, President and CEO of The Open Group; Eric Boulay, president and CEO of Arismore and also CEO of The Open Group, France; Chris Forde, vice president of Enterprise Architecture & Membership Capabilities of The Open Group; Mats Gejnevall, a Certified Enterprise Architect with Capgemini, Sweden, and Stuart Macgregor, CEO of Real IRM and CEO of The Open Group, South Africa. The panel is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Brown: Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an umbrella term that relates to an awful lot of activity that flows further down, whether it’s business IT architecture, data architecture, and so on. There are many things, but the driving force in many organizations is this need to integrate and share information.

A trend over a number of years now is that the barriers within enterprises; the silos, the departments, the stovepipes, have been broken down.

Organizations are working cross-functionally. They’re bringing people together. They’re working with their business partners, and they have their IT infrastructure integrated with their business partners. That has caused a requirement for people to be able to look across the entire organization and think about how IT impacts different parts of the organization and how it integrates together.

Many parts of the organization have had applications built for the stovepipes that now need to work together in ways that they were never intended, when those legacy applications were put in, because we never intended those legacy applications to last this long. But, they did, and you can’t just replace them.

What’s happened with what we call boundaryless information flow, or the requirement for access to integrated information under security issues, is that we’re now having to deal with something called “EA” on a number of different levels.

Different aspects

Many people have tried to define EA, and I don’t think anyone has come up with a satisfactory overarching definition yet. But, there are a number of different aspects to it. At the moment, EA is focused on the IT element, although it has ambition to look at the architecture of an entire enterprise at some stage.

We’re seeing continued growth in the adoption of EA in general and TOGAF in particular — and it’s continuing to grow. There are organizations that are saying that EA isn’t delivering near-term to the bottom lines, so they’re going to cut the cost.

There are more organizations that are saying that this is the time to invest, to rationalize, and to really drive out value from their IT investment. It varies from enterprise to enterprise. So, you’re starting to see a mix of things. But, generally speaking, my experience in the developed or struggling economies is that there are more people focused on EA than not.

We’re seeing EA and TOGAF adoption pretty broadly across the planet, really. Obviously the US and UK were leading, but the amount of uptake in the Asia-Pacific region right now is quite dramatic and we’re starting to see that take off. But, it’s really difficult to isolate any particular region.

We’ve now got something like 15,000 members of our professional body, the Association of The Open Group Enterprise Architects. They are, in some way or another, connected with TOGAF for our IT architect certification. Those people are distributed across 116 different countries. So, it’s really quite difficult to say which is growing the most.

Boulay: Key drivers for EA in France are the necessity to move forward for big and small enterprises. Because of the downturn, the future of the enterprise is to roll out in an international, standard view. In order to roll out — for example, for big banks on a European or worldwide basis — they have to welcome big transformation, and this kind of big transformation can be helped by EA.

It’s an architecture issue to transform local enterprise to a worldwide or a European enterprise. This is a huge opportunity for enterprise architects and for EA to help in this big change. So, there is no downturn for EA, because if we use it and build a new EA practice in order to better address this kind of job, it’s a huge opportunity for us. There is no downturn for us. It’s only a matter of finding the right skills in order to help enterprise go abroad.

We spent a lot of time to move from IT EA to real EA. Now, I think we’re mature enough to take the new capability brought by the new technologies. Cloud should be one of them. And now, once more we’re ready to move from the old-fashioned way of sharing resources to better practices brought by new technology. You can transform the business, but you also can transform the way to consume IT.

Forde: The Chinese market is really very interesting. There’s an opportunity there for the EA practice to grow massively. For the most part, larger enterprises in the China region are relying on the brand name western companies to do strategy and planning, and there is very limited internal capability, knowledge, and experience around EA.

I’ve been hearing from folks in various organizations, both state-owned companies and others, that they’re reluctant to step away from these brand-name companies, because there is a certain degree of security around the planning and activities that go on there, but there is also a degree of dissatisfaction that they aren’t feeling in control of their own fate.

Over the next several years, I anticipate the development of internal architecture practices and an up-scaling of staff. The universities already have in place CIO forums and executive MBA activities that explicitly deal with EA as a set of concepts. Over time, I think that it’s going to find it’s place in the Chinese organizations.

At the moment, they’re still continuing with this kind of organic growth of the IT approach to things, which is something that the Western markets dealt with 15 years ago, and found the need for a more planful approach to doing things.

This is the opportunity for us in EA in that particular market. The issue is that at the leadership level in these companies there isn’t a perception that they need to do anything, because the problem hasn’t actually arrived broadly inside China, from what I’m seeing.

Gejnevall: Transformation has always been a big driver in the enterprise Architecture Forum, but what we see these days is that getting your IT under control has been a major factor for going into the EA side of things. Slowly the companies now are connecting the IT structures they have with the business.

It was a struggle in the beginning, and most of the EA projects were IT-based projects, but now, business is starting to understand the full impact and understand that the IT solutions that we create should really be aligned with the long-term strategies and objectives of the organizations.

In the past, public sector has been pretty slow on the uptake, but recently we’re doing a lot of business with healthcare services and so on. They’re really large organizations, with 30,000, 40,000, or 50,000 people, and they have lots of different divisions. They need to work together in a collaborative fashion and fulfill the long term goals that the politicians have set up for them.

Macgregor: South Africa is slightly different, because EA is from the business side, rather than from technology. A lot of organizations have spent a lot of money working on business processes, and that business process architecture across the business domain is now being linked to the technology domains.

In fact, we’re coming from the top down, instead of from the technology side upward. South Africa currently has roughly 10 percent of the Architecture Forum membership, all South Africans, and there is a big adoption of TOGAF in South Africa. If you look at our GDP in comparison, it’s quite exceptional.

That’s really been because of The Open Group’s presence in South Africa, organizing events, a lot of TOGAF training, a lot of certification, a lot of press articles, and really driving the business value and the business understanding of what EA is about.

We have had for example, SASOL which is one of the larger petrochemical organizations, adopt TOGAF, working it into the government standard. What their enterprise architect did, is he bought Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, the Jeanne Ross book, and distributed to senior executives. Given that it is written in business-speak, it really led to the adoption and understanding of what EA is about, and was quite serious for the uptake within the business.

We differ across business sectors as well, in that our financial services sector — again, a big focus on the business process area — are lagging in the technology domain, and that’s now a key focus area bringing that up to speed.

We’re seeing greater focus on modeling and defining information architecture. We’re understanding the difference between information architecture and data architecture and using that as a way of bridging the gap between business and technology, while tackling the information architecture domain.

Body of knowledge

Forde: The learning that has occurred in the Western markets have produced a body of knowledge in TOGAF that can accelerate for other companies the way they adopt and improve their ability to deliver on strategy, planning, and execution.

Once the recognition is there inside companies, when the need arrives, those companies in that market that have planned for this will start to really accelerate in terms of their global position.

Gejnevall: Capgemini has put together a number of service offerings worldwide that we are adapting to the conditions of each one of the countries. We can see that things like boundaryless information — being able to use information in new ways — is something that every company wants to do.

In cloud, it always comes into the discussion, even though people don’t quite know how to use it yet. I think The Open Group’s effort around cloud computing can actually help that to a large extent. The ROI paper on cloud computing, for instance, will be a tremendous help for a lot of companies to have a look at and see what can they do. But, everything is moving very, very slowly. In countries like Sweden, the bigger companies might try these out, but the smaller ones are not ready yet.

Brown: Everything I hear says that organizations that are involved in EA in general, and TOGAF in particular, are finding it much easier to integrate with business partners. Mergers and acquisitions are enabled more effectively. So, in working with other organizations, as we get more and more connected, EA is a positive force in that.

Depending on the maturity of the company and of the region, you might be talking anywhere from six-month payback on an EA activity to a three-year payback.

You can get to one of the conferences and share experiences with other members. That’s the key area to start. But, if you can’t do that, then there is an awful lot of available information. At the minimum, TOGAF itself is available freely online for people to read, look at, and use within their own organization.

You can buy the book, if it’s easier to have that. If you want to go to the next state, there are many trainee organizations that can train your people in TOGAF. If you can’t avail yourself of that — there are some countries where that’s not possible — then there is a study guide that you can get from The Open Group to work your way through.

Forde: The body of work that we have available to us in TOGAF is that, if you look at it as a tool in the context of the problem you’re trying to solve, you can drive immediate value. If you look at it as some sort of massive program that you’re going to implement, you’re looking at a longer term payback.

So, it’s very important for individuals and companies to approach EA with a specific problem in mind, not just some sort of generic goodness thing that they’re looking at.

There are a number of places [to get started]. The first and foremost one will be the membership of The Open Group, and particularly the Architecture Forum. You’ve got people sitting around this microphone right now that can help, and you’ve got people out at the conference who have an enormous background and this capability.

Then, in the member companies, either on the supplier side, on the customer side, or in academia, you also have resources available. Those are the places to go to find out what you need to do, and what the approaches can be used, and in a practical sense, what the barriers and the pitfalls are in the approaches. People here have been there, done that, and that’s where you need to go, to the experience.

Macgregor: To me organization change leadership is an absolute essential component of getting EA to work, the mechanics of modeling etc. It’s not really that difficult. It’s the stuff that we have mastered and we’ve been doing for years. It’s how to drive positive business-appropriate and sustainable EA practices that are run like businesses with a very clearly defined offering that understands who the customers are, and can really deliver more value than they cost.

Boulay: In France, we had a long journey to capture EA practice. Right now, we consider that we moved from IT EA to enterprise, to real business EA, and this is a big shift. Now, CxOs aren’t chasing enterprise architects. They’re trying to educate enterprise architects inside their company. They understand that they need these kind of people in order to make the company be successful and to move forward.

So, it’s a big challenge and a big recognition for us. They need our body of knowledge as TOGAF and the EA body of knowledge. They need us to train, coach, and to help their inside employees to become leaders. Enterprise architects are definitely, as many of you mentioned, people who are ready to talk with different groups in order to ensure there are no more stovepipe in these companies.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

You may also be interested in:

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• The Open Group’s Allen Brown on Advancing the Value of Enterprise IT Through Architecture
• The State of Enterprise Architecture: Vast Promise or Lost Opportunity?

Nokia Siemens Networks is in talks to buy the telecom-equipment arm of Motorola Inc., people familiar with the matter said, a deal that would hasten the dismantling of the U.S. technology company.

The two companies are discussing terms, and a deal could be worth $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion, one of the people said. A deal could be reached in the next few weeks, people familiar with the matter said, though …

Read the Complete Article

Source: WSJ

Thompson Street Capital Partners and Charterhouse Group have acquired Colo4 LLC, a Dallas-based provider of carrier-neutral colocation data center services. No financial terms were disclosed.

PRESS RELEASE

Thompson Street Capital Partners (“Thompson Street”) and Charterhouse Group, Inc. (”Charterhouse”) have announced their acquisition of Colo4, LLC (“Colo4”) in partnership with Cequel III, a St. Louis-based management and investment firm led by Jerry Kent and Howard Wood.

Colo4 is a leading provider of carrier-neutral colocation data center services. With a 68,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art data center in Dallas, the Company is dedicated to protecting, connecting and powering its customer’s critical information assets. Since 2000, global enterprises, financial institutions, health care organizations, leading Web content providers, and other organizations around the globe have trusted Colo4 as their strategic data center partner.

Thompson Street is a St. Louis-based private equity group focused on acquisitions of niche leaders in various industries. Charterhouse is a New York-based private equity firm that has backed entrepreneurs and supported growing middle-market companies since 1973. Charterhouse has collaborated with Cequel III executives on several successful investments in the past including Charter Communications and AAT Communications, which were successful build-ups in the cable and wireless tower markets, respectively.

Paul Estes of Cequel III has been named the Company’s President and CEO and will work closely with the existing management team at Colo4. Estes said: “We anticipate great growth opportunities in this business, as more and more companies are looking for the type of unrivaled support that Colo4 offers to maintain its customers’ mission-critical information systems.”

Jim Cooper, Managing Partner of Thompson Street Capital, added: “We are excited about partnering with Cequel III and Charterhouse to acquire Colo4. The data center industry should continue to benefit from the explosive growth in demand for broadband Internet services.”

Thomas C. Dircks, Managing Partner at Charterhouse, stated: “This will be our fifth investment with the team at Cequel III, a partnership that has produced outstanding results for our firm and its investors. It is also a great example of how we work with our entrepreneur network to source attractive portfolio companies and build them into stronger enterprises by combining strategic, managerial, operational and financial expertise. We are very excited about this next chapter with Cequel III as well as the opportunity to work with the Thompson Street Capital team.”

Commenting on the partnership, Jerry Kent CEO of Cequel III, said: “We’re very pleased to have this opportunity to work with St. Louis-based Thompson Street and again collaborate with our colleagues at Charterhouse, with whom we have been partners for more than 25 years. We look forward to growing Cequel Data Centers through additional acquisitions with these high-quality firms.”

About Thompson Street Capital Partners:
Thompson Street Capital Partners has $450 million in capital under management. The private equity firm makes investments in service, manufacturing, and distribution businesses. The fund’s philosophy is to partner with management in leveraged acquisitions, recapitalizations, corporate divestitures and going-private transactions. Thompson Street Capital Partners is located in St. Louis, Mo. and was founded in 2000. For more information on Thompson Street, please visit www.thompsonstreet.net.

About Charterhouse Group:
Charterhouse Group, Inc. is a New York-based private equity firm with over three and a half decades of experience in building leading middle-market companies. Established in 1973, Charterhouse has invested in excess of $2.0 billion in equity and established over 100 platform companies with a focus in the Business Services, Healthcare Services and Consumer Products and Services sectors. For more information on Charterhouse, please visit www.charterhousegroup.com.

About Cequel III:
Cequel III is a St. Louis-based investment and management firm, established in January 2002 by partners Jerry Kent, Howard Wood, and Dan Bergstein. Since then, the Cequel III team has been involved with a number of companies, including Suddenlink Communications (cable broadband systems), Cequel Sites (wireless towers and services), and previously, AAT Communications Corp. (wireless towers).

About Colo4:
Colo4 is a leading provider of carrier-neutral colocation data center services in Dallas, with a 68,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art data center equipped with highly redundant power supplies, environmental controls, and other critical infrastructure service and support. The Company offers high-end technical capabilities and unrivaled support to maintain its customers’ mission-critical information systems.

On Tuesday, the Charterhouse Group and Thompson Street Capital Partners announced they have bought Colo4 LLC, an outsourced provider of colocation services to third parties. Companies outsource their computing infrastructure to Colo4 rather than build their own data centers.

It’s unclear what Colo4 sold for, but Charterhouse has invested in the sector before. In 2004, Charterhouse bought Lason inc., a provider of information management and business process outsourcing to customers in financial services, healthcare and government. Charterhouse sold it in 2007 for more than $120 million, or roughly 5x return on invested capital.

Outsourcers remain a strong sector for PE because many firms have held up during the recession. Just consider ADP, a provider of HR, payroll and benefits administration services, which has nearly $9 billion in revenues and about 570,000 customers. Shares of ADP closed Tuesday at $41.51, near its 52-week high of $45.74 which it hit in late April. However, ADP is not owned by PE (although Capital Research Global Investors has a small stake).

Firms in the space are trading at 10 times EBITDA, one buyout executive says.

One of the biggest PE deals in the space occurred in 2005, when seven PE firms– including Bain Capital, KKR, TPG and the Blackstone Group –bought SunGard for $36 a share. Sungard, which is still private, provides software and technology processing services for clients in the financial services sector. First quarter revenue for SunGard fell 6% to $1.25 billion while adjusted EBITDA was off 9% to $297 million.

“SunGard has withstood the recession insofar as they haven’t declined,” one banker said. “They haven’t grown either, but it’s a positive that they haven’t declined, because many other tech companies have.”

Source: PEHUB.com

FAIRFAX, Va. (AP) — For the second time in as many months, information technology company CGI Group Inc. on Monday extended its $903 million tender offer for Stanley Inc., a government contractor.

The Canadian company said in May it would buy Stanley for $37.50 per share in cash. The boards of both companies approved the deal.

The offer, made through one of its subsidiaries, was extended until midnight Aug. 2. The previous extension expired Friday.

CGI said about 84 percent of Stanley’s shares have already been validly tendered.

CGI said it was extending the offer because the deal had not yet gotten some required regulatory clearances.

Stanley, based in Arlington, Va., provides systems and professional service support to the federal government. CGI plans to make Stanley part of its CGI Federal unit, which does business with the U.S. government and defense, intelligence, and civilian agencies.

Shares of CGI rose 6 cents to close at $15.52 Monday. Stanley shares slipped 2 cents to $37.42.

Source: http://www.ft.com

Aon will pay $50 a Hewitt share. That is a 41 percent premium from Hewitt’s closing price Friday of $35.40.

Aon, based in Chicago, plans to integrate Hewitt with its existing consulting and outsourcing operations and create a new unit, Aon Hewitt, after the deal closes.

Russell P. Fradin, chairman and chief executive of Hewitt, will take on the same roles at Aon Hewitt.

Aon said it will create an “integration team” lead by Greg Besio, chief administrative officer of Aon. The team will include Kristi Savacool, senior vice president of Hewitt Large Markets Benefits Outsourcing; Jim Konieczny, president of Hewitt HR Business Process Outsourcing; Yvan Legris, president of Hewitt Consulting; and Kathryn Hayley, co-chief executive of Aon Consulting.

Hewitt, based in Lincolnshire, Ill., is a human resources consulting and outsourcing company.

Aon said it expected the dealwould save $355 million a year beginning in 2013, primarily from reducing back-office areas, management overlap and public company costs and getting more from technology platforms. It said the deal will help earnings in 2011 and 2012.

Hewitt stockholders will receive $25.61 in cash and about 0.64 percent of a share in Aon stock for each Hewitt share. The total payment will be $2.45 billion in cash and 64 million shares.

The deal is expected to close by mid-November.

Source: www.nytimes.com

MUMBAI: BSE-listed IT major, Omnitech Infosolutions, is close to sealing up to two acquisitions in Europe and the US for around USD 35 million even as it aims for a nearly four-fold growth over the next three years.

“We have short-listed four companies, two in the US and one each in the UK and Netherlands, for acquisitions. The deal-size for the US one is around USD 20 million and for the European one, around USD 15 million,” the company’s Managing Director, Atul Hemnani, told PTI here.

The company is open to multiple buys — one in each geography, Hemnani said, adding that negotiations are in the advanced stage and “if all goes well, we should seal at least one deal in the next 45 days.”

Funding would pose no problem as Omnitech has already tied-up Lines of Credit with two banks — one domestic and one an MNC, he said.

“The Indian bank, in fact, has offered us the entire USD 20 million,” he added.

The two US target companies are in the infrastructure management services (IMS) and application management spaces, respectively. The Netherlands one in the IMS domain and cloud-computing while the UK company is in the disaster recovery and business continuity and IMS segments, he said.

Omnitech’s core business focus areas are IMS, application managed services and increasingly, cloud-computing.

Source: Economictimes.Indiatimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Dell Inc said on Thursday it agreed to acquire privately held Scalent, a maker of data center software, for an undisclosed amount.

Dell expects the deal to close in the current quarter.

Dell said the deal will help it solidify an important component of its enterprise solutions portfolio, working with its existing line of servers, storage and network platforms.

Scalent, which was founded in 2003, provides software for automating infrastructure in data centers.

Its investors include Hummer Winblad, JK&B Capital, FirstMark Capital and Credit Suisse.

Dell said last week it is aiming to double to size of its enterprise solutions business, with acquisitions key to that growth.

The shares of Round Rock, Texas-based Dell closed down 0.25 percent at $12.03 on the Nasdaq.

Source: www.reuters.com

A new Google search tool to allow people to search easily for air travel and book travel plans is now on the runway, The New York Times’s Brad Stone reports from San Francisco.

The company said Thursday that it had agreed to acquire ITA Software, a 14-year-old company that makes software that organizes flight and pricing information, for $700 million in cash.

ITA, based in Boston, specializes in organizing airline data, including flight times, seat availability and pricing.

Google said in a blog post that the company will work on creating new flight search tools that make it easier for people to make their travel plans online.

The move could help Google compete more effectively in this area with its main Microsoft-run competitor, Bing. Travel search is especially important since Google says almost half of all airline tickets are sold online.

Bing Travel, a feature that Microsoft often touts in ads, provides detailed travel information and air fare data for air travel searches. A Bing query such as “fly from St. Louis to Boston” includes a chart showing how the cost for such a trip is likely to fluctuate over time, and compares the current prices for the flight on various travel sites.

The same search on Google currently links only to sites such as CheapTickets.com and Expedia.com.

“ITA’s very talented team has created an impressive product to organize flight information,” said Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google. “Their technology opens exciting possibilities for us to create new ways for users to more easily find flight information online, and we’re looking forward to welcoming them to Google.”

“It is a privilege to work with a most skilled and dedicated team to build innovative technologies that people use every day,” said Jeremy Wertheimer, chief executive and president of ITA Software Inc. “We are all looking forward to continuing and expanding our efforts as part of Google.”

Source: NYTimes.com

Acquisition Enhances Cognizant’s Global Program Management Capabilities; Expands Footprint in Australia, UK, New Zealand

TEANECK, N.J., May 10, 2010 – Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH), a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, announced today it has acquired The PIPC Group, a global program management consulting firm based in London. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

With more than 200 professionals worldwide, primarily in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S., PIPC helps leading global companies drive business transformation by providing industry-leading program management services, methods and tools, including its PMO (Project Management Office) core competency and its PhD (Project Health Diagnostic) tool, which has been successfully deployed in over 800 engagements. PIPC will extend and complement Cognizant’s existing project management and consulting capabilities and further Cognizant’s ability to provide integrated services across consulting, technology, and business process outsourcing.

“We welcome PIPC’s talented program management experts to Cognizant. At a time when cyclical and secular pressures are driving clients to seek new performance thresholds, effective program management is essential to ensure measurable business outcomes. PIPC’s strategic program management offerings will strengthen our ability to manage increasingly complex global projects while expanding our geographic footprint, particularly in Australia, New Zealand and the UK,” said Francisco D’Souza, President and CEO, Cognizant. “This acquisition builds on our long-standing strategy of adding sharply focused business capabilities that complement our existing offerings and enhance the value we offer clients.”

“With 85,500 associates worldwide, Cognizant will provide the global delivery capability, experience and scale to enable PIPC to accelerate its growth ambitions. Our organizations have the right cultural fit, and together we can drive business transformation initiatives that combine high-quality consulting, IT, and business process outsourcing services with our advanced project management offerings,” said Simon Rawling, Group Managing Director at PIPC.

About PIPC

Formed in 1992, PIPC is a global program management consulting firm. With expertise spanning several industries including financial services, retail, oil and gas, utilities, government and public sector, communications and the environmental sector, the company serves clients worldwide from delivery locations in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. Its services range from managing post-M&A integration through strategic software implementations, with a broad range of delivery capabilities. More information is at www.pipc.com.

About Cognizant

Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services. Cognizant’s single-minded passion is to dedicate our global technology and innovation know-how, our industry expertise and worldwide resources to working together with clients to make their businesses stronger. With over 50 global delivery centers and more than 85,500 employees as of March 31, 2010, we combine a unique global delivery model infused with a distinct culture of customer satisfaction. A member of the NASDAQ-100 Index and S&P 500 Index, Cognizant is a Forbes Global 2000 company and a member of the Fortune 1000 and is ranked among the top information technology companies in BusinessWeek’s Hot Growth and Top 50 Performers listings. Visit us online at www.cognizant.com.

Acquisition Expands Cognizant’s Global Testing Practice, One of the World’s Largest, And Extends Footprint in France

TEANECK, N.J., June 17, 2010 – Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH), a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, announced today it has acquired Galileo Performance, a Paris-based provider of information technology (IT) testing consulting services. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Galileo helps leading companies in France optimize and extend business performance through IT system measurement, management and testing. Galileo will expand and complement Cognizant’s fast-growing global testing practice, currently among the world’s largest with more than 10,000 testing professionals, while strengthening Cognizant’s existing business presence in France.

Outsourced testing services have been growing significantly, not only for their value in lowering the cost of quality assurance and software maintenance, but also for ensuring tighter alignment of IT with business objectives, greater operational effectiveness, and improved governance and risk mitigation. Industry research firm IDC forecasts a five-year CAGR of 19% for discrete global testing services, reaching an estimated $17.7 billion by 2013. 1

“We welcome Galileo’s talented consultants to Cognizant. The acquisition will enable Cognizant to bring world-class testing services to the French market, and the addition of French-speaking consultants will help us better serve our customers in the region,” said Francisco D’Souza, President and CEO, Cognizant.

“We are delighted to join Cognizant. With a shared commitment to client satisfaction and delivery excellence, together we can deliver a comprehensive suite of software testing services spanning consulting, enterprise services and functionality testing, with a native French-speaking capability,” said Abel Guerrini, Managing Director, Galileo Performance.

“New virtualized business and technology architectures require that quality assurance and testing organizations transform themselves into full lifecycle partners, working with business users, developers and others within and outside of the client organization to champion software quality,” said Sumithra Gomatam, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Cognizant’s Testing Practice. “We look forward to working with the Galileo team to expand Cognizant’s testing services in the French market, and to bring innovative testing services including managed test centers as well as virtualized and cloud-enabled testing to clients.”

About Galileo Performance

Galileo Performance is a consulting firm dedicated to the measurement, management and continuous optimization of IT system performance. Staffed by a team of 29 experienced professionals, Galileo Performance offers its clients proven solutions and cost efficiencies. More information is available at www.galileo-performance.fr.

About Cognizant

Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services. Cognizant’s single-minded passion is to dedicate our global technology and innovation know-how, our industry expertise and worldwide resources to working together with clients to make their businesses stronger. With over 50 global delivery centers and more than 85,500 employees as of March 31, 2010, we combine a unique global delivery model infused with a distinct culture of customer satisfaction. A member of the NASDAQ-100 Index and S&P 500 Index, Cognizant is a Forbes Global 2000 company and a member of the Fortune 1000 and is ranked among the top information technology companies in BusinessWeek’s Hot Growth and Top 50 Performers listings. Visit us online at www.cognizant.com.

1 IDC, “Worldwide Discrete Testing Services 2009–2013 Forecast: Stepping Out from the Shadows,” Doc # 219959, Sept. 2009.

Source: www.cognizant.com

Among the most significant announcements Tuesday is the next iteration of the HP Business Service Management (BSM) software suite. HP BSM 9.0 works on automating comprehensive management across applications lifecycles, with new means to bring a common approach to hybrid-sourced app delivery models. Whether apps are supported from virtualized infrastructures, on-premises stacks, private clouds, public clouds, software as a service (SaaS) sources, or outsourced IT — they need to managed with commonality. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“Our customers are dealing with some of the most significant combination of changes in IT technologies and paradigm that I have ever seen,” said Robin Purohit, Vice President and General Manager of HP Software Products. “So whether it’s a whole new way of developing applications like Agile, the real acceleration of virtualization, test environments moving into production workloads, and all of the evaluations of where the cloud and SaaS fits — and then how they support all the enterprise applications.”

[See an interview with Purohit on BSM 9.0, or listen to it as a podcast.]

HP’s core message around the BSM 9.0 is clear: To help companies automate apps and services management amid complexity so they can reinvest in innovation. The economics of innovation — of being able to do more in terms of results without the luxury of spending a lot more — has to be factored into the management matrix.

“We did a study last October that showed our clients believe innovation is going to help them even through uncertain economic times—and they see technology as central to their ability to succeed in a changing environment,” said Paul Muller, vice president of Strategic Marketing, Software Products, HP Software & Solutions. “There is some skepticism within the business community that IT is ready to make those changes.”

HP’s view of the hybrid world

HP wants to help IT combat that skepticism by equipping them with HP BSM 9.0. The solutions not only address hybrid delivery models, but also what Muller calls the “consumerization of IT,” referring to people who use non-company-owned devices on a company network. As Muller sees it, employees expect to have the same dependable experience while working from home as they do at work.

“We believe organizations will struggle to deliver the quality outcomes expected of them unless they are able to deal with the increase rate of change that occurs when you deploy virtualization or cloud technologies,” Muller said. “It’s a change that allows for innovation, but it’s also a change that creates opportunity for something to go wrong.”

Indeed, Bill Veghte, HP Executive Vice President for HP Software and Solutions, said that three major trends — all game changers on their own — are converging around IT: virtualization, cloud, and mobile.

“We need to continuously simplify” management to head off rapid complexity acceleration aroud this confluence of trends. He pointed to the need for gaining a comprehensive view into hybrid IT operations, automation for management and remediation, and “simply expressing” the views on what is going on it IT, regardless of the location or types of services.

“Users want a unified view in a visually compelling way, and they want to be able to take action on it,” said Veghte.

At the center of Wednesday’s announcement is what HP proposes as the solution to this challenge: HP BSM 9.0. The software offers several features that should cause companies that work with hybrid IT environments to take a closer look. One of those features is automated operations that work to reduce troubleshooting costs and hasten repair time. BSM 9.0 also offers cloud-ready and virtualized operations that aim to reduce security risks with strategic management services.

“The active interest of our clients in cloud computing has just exploded,” said Purohit. “I think last year was a curiosity for many senior IT executives something on the horizon, but this year it’s really an active evaluation. I think most customers are looking initially at something a little safer, meaning a private cloud approach, where there is either new stack of infrastructure and applications are run for them by somebody else on their site, or at some off-site operation. So that seems to be the predominant new paradigm.”

Purohit described BSM 9 as “a breakthrough” for coming to grips with the “hybrid data center.”

It’s the great trap because if you don’t know what infrastructure your application is depending on from one minute to the next, you can’t troubleshoot it when something goes wrong.

Indeed, integration is a running theme with HP BSM 9.0. The solution offers a single, integrated view for IT to manage enterprise services in hybrid environments, while new collaborative operations promise to boost efficiency with an integrated view for service operations management. Every IT operations user receives contextual and role-based information through mobile devices and other access points for faster resolution.

“BSM 9 is our solution for end-to-end monitoring of services in the data center. It’s been a great business for us, and we now have a break-through release that we reveled to our customers today, that’s anchored around what we call the Runtime Service Model,” said Purohit.

“So a service model is basically a real-time map of everything from the business transactions of the businesses running, to all of the software that makes up that composite applications for the service, and all of the infrastructure whether it be physical or virtual or on-premise or off-premise that supports all of that application,” said Purohit.

“So all of that together — knowing how it’s connected, what the health of it is, what’s changing in it so, you can actually make sure it’s all running exactly the way the business expects — is really critical,” he said.

The run-time service model works to save time by improving organizational service impact analysis and troubleshooting processing times, said HP. The HP Business Availability Center (BAC) 9.0 offers an integrated user experience as well as applications monitoring and diagnostics with HP’s twist on the run-time service model.

“The rate of change in the way infrastructure elements relate to each other — or even where they are from one minute to the next — means we’ve moved from an environment where you could scan your infrastructure weekly and still be quite accurate to workloads shifting minute by minute,” Muller said. “It’s the great trap because if you don’t know what infrastructure your application is depending on from one minute to the next, you can’t troubleshoot it when something goes wrong.”

Other elements of BPM 9.0 include the BAC Anywhere service that lets organizations monitor external web apps from anywhere, even outside the firewall, from a single integrated console. HP Operations Manager i 9.0 promises to improve IT service performance by way of “smart plug-ins” that automatically discover application changes and updates them in the run-time service model. Finally, HP Network Management Center 9.0 gives aims to give companies better network visibility by connecting virtual services, physical networks and public cloud services together.

HP’s expanded universe

In other HP news, the company announced software that aims to accelerate application testing while reducing the risks associated with new delivery models. Dubbed HP Test Data Management, HP also promises the new solution lowers costs associated with application testing and ensures sensitive data doesn’t violate compliance regulations.

The improvement helps simplify and accelerate testing data preparation, an important factor in making tests and quality more integral to applications development and deployment, again, across a variety of infrastructure models.

Along with HP Test Data Management, HP launched new integrations between HP Quality Center and the Collabnet TeamForge with the goal of improving communication and collaboration among business analysts, project managers, developers and quality assurance teams.

The integration with CollabNet, built largely on Apache Subversion, will help further bind the “devops” process, said Purohit. “The result is better apps,” he said.

And as part of its work to help clients maximize software investments, HP also rolled HP Solution Management Services. This offering is a converged portfolio of software support and consulting services that offers a single point of accountability to manage enterprise software investments.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

You may also be interested in:

• HP Data Protector, a case study on scale and completeness for total enterprise data backup and recovery

• Delta Air Lines improves customer self-service apps quickly using automated quality assurance tools strategically

• McKesson shows bringing testing tools on the road improves speed to market and customer satisfaction

Shiv Nadar, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of HCL Technologies, is a man of many colours. Having founded HCL in the mid-1970s, he has transformed the IT hardware company into a superior IT Enterprise by constantly reinventing his company’s focus. In 2008, Nadar was awarded Padma Bhushan for his efforts in IT industry. ET NOW catches up with Shiv ‘Magnus’ Nadar on the emerging trends and upcoming business plans of the tech major. Excerpts:

If you look at the Indian IT industry, it does seem to be at the crossroads in some sense, whether it is from the environment point of view, the changes that are happening or the organisations themselves as a generational change that’s happening or Infosys, Mr. Murthy and Mr. Nilekani have stepped out. At HCL, of course, you are taking a backseat now. At TCS, Mr. Ramadorai has retired. So what are the challenges that the Indian IT industry is going to face, the new generation is going to face going ahead?

The new generation has been faced in over a long period of time, if you have seen the strong highly professionalized structures. So there is not anyone just new who is likely to just pop up in any of these places. it is also true of Cognizant, which is another large company and all these names, which you have seen, either TCS or Infosys or Wipro or HCL or Cognizant, all these names you would have heard over a period of time. So the baton changing has been pretty well planned and smooth.

But if you look at the change that’s happening, it is also significant because of what is happening outside in terms of the environment in which the IT industry is operating, it is very clear that it is not possible for these companies to keep growing at 40% like they did for the best part of 1990s and even well into 2000. NASSCOM itself says growth will be above 13% this year. This is going to be a tougher environment than possibly what the first generation faced?

It is typical of any product lifecycle chain. You see a product lifecycle. If you have seen the BCG Matrix, it goes through a question mark stage, then it goes through a star stage, then it goes to the cash-cow stage, then it goes through a dog stage, then it reinvents itself and goes through the cycles. This industry in India has gone through one cycle and it is complete and you see each of the characteristics, high margins, easier cash flows, environment supporting it, then mid margins but profit levels are very good and it just knows that every analyst will say that the margins are going to go southwards because it is offshore. How much more can it get out of efficiency increases? Then inkjet technologies have becomes a question mark again.

Can we say that the golden era for the Indian IT industry is possibly over?

No, golden era, the way we were doing, it is over. It was given a great start like all Japanese companies got a great start. Taiwanese companies had a great start, so we had a great start. Now we have to convert into global companies like Citi or a GE and then use capabilities that exist globally. Like what we are trying to do, if you have seen acquisition of Axon, we just jumped the stage, went to architecting and consulting and in which we use totally global workforce because there is not very much in India that exists.

What are the emerging technology trends, which will drive the growth of Indian IT industry, cloud computing for example?

Cloud computing is definitely one but it is just one such mega trends, which would be there but India has to adapt the Indian companies, the five companies that you named, will have to adapt to global M&As. You can see that the global M&A in the next 10 years will be a big trend. Another very big trend is world will shift out of the yesterday’s powers, which is US and Western Europe. China will be a big factor. India will be a big factor plus India will be a big market. Five years ago not even 1% of the market for any of these companies was India but worldwide if it is going to be 10%, it should be 10%, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, they all will be bigger markets. There will be market shifts. There is a technology shift, which will take place every five years, five, may be seven, it is going to take place.

How is this M&A going to affect the landscape of the Indian IT industry?

All the Indian companies may have consumed some or be part of a larger one. We have to be completely open about this. When I started HCL in 1976, the thought that there is going to be a global company holding shares in a company somehow would not get into my head.

I remember Dr. Seshagiri when HP took shares in our company, 26% shares in 1991, he called me and said ‘Nadar, what are you going to do with this money? You can’t wear two shirts at the same time.’ Of course we did not do it for wearing two shirts. We did that because that is what was required at that time.

So when the landscape itself is changing, so what are the new geographies that the Indian IT companies need to chase? You talked about how the global economic weight is going to shift out of developed countries into emerging markets, so do they have to start looking more inwardly or do they still have big opportunities waiting to be tapped in Europe, US and Japan?

We have not addressed Japan. We have not addressed Germany. We have not addressed China. If you really look at as have the Indian companies addressed them, realistically no, though the stock market is getting very excited about the Euro falling, there is not much of market place that we are truly getting out of these European countries.

We survived the American recession pretty well. Of course companies laid off people, growth shrank but how is this European crisis going to play out as far as the Indian IT is concerned?

There are no issues about the demand there. Demand will continue to be there, the way of serving the demand will have to be different.

In what sense?

We will have to serve it from there.

HCL Technologies has a large exposure to the European markets, about 26% of revenues come from Europe, so how much of an impact is that going to make if for example the Euro depreciates and the economy weakens there? How much is that going to hit someone like you?

We already have execution done. When you talk about Europe, you normally cover UK as well as Europe. The entire Axon execution, virtually 100% of it gets done in the respective countries, so you have to take a big percentage and say that this is completely un-impacted. There is a good deal of what we work in UK itself and Germany is being served by officers and executives who come from those countries. We have 4000 people in England alone, English nationals.

HCL Technologies signed a large, $500 million deal with Merck recently, so are there more such deals in the pipeline, do you see them on the horizon for HCL Tech?

We say this is a business, which is in the pipeline. This is a business, which is in contention and this is a business, which we’ve been in. Our most worrisome point when the recession took place was pipeline was getting very thin, so if it is not there, your percentage the one that you have to get becomes extremely high, then you lose on the margins.

The pipeline was getting thinner and Vineet used to mention ‘I meet only in case the deal size is beyond a certain thing and I am not finding so many of them’ but that time is conclusively behind us whether it is US or whether it is Europe or whether it is Japan, the pipelines are healthy, as healthy as we have ever seen.

You mentioned Axon. Now every Indian company, at least the top rung companies have tried to build their own consulting practice but they have not been too successful, so why do you think that HCL is going to do well where others have tried and not done so well?

We are doing well in that. We acquired that. When we do something like this, it contains risk. Sometimes risk do not work. The more if it does not work, the better prepared that we have to be and we knew one big differential step that we had to take. We had to leave the management to people belonging the locations, some changes may take place but people who have managed that consulting existed only in those countries. They did not exist within our company or within any of the companies emanating out of India, so that’s a big risk. You do not know whether we will cross-culturally manage another team.

Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com

NIS Holdings SARL (Northgate) is pleased to announce that it has completed its acquisition of the HR Management division of Convergys (NYSE: CVG), a publicly-held company headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio and a global leader in relationship management.

This business will be integrated into NorthgateArinso, the Northgate division that is a world leader in Human Resources (HR) software and services. Funding for the acquisition has been provided by additional equity funding from funds managed by KKR, the majority shareholder in Northgate.

NorthgateArinso announced its intention to acquire the HRM division of Convergys on March 4, 2010. The acquisition supports the company’s growth strategy and goal to be the number one focused provider of HR software and services globally, and substantially boosts its North American operations. The division now employs 8,000 people in 35 countries worldwide, of which a third are based in North America. Total Northgate Group employees now exceed 12,000.

Following the completion of the acquisition the division will move its North American headquarters from Atlanta to the former Convergys facility in Jacksonville, Florida. Trey Campbell will continue to lead the combined NorthgateArinso North American operations.

The expanded company will give organizations worldwide access to a complete portfolio of HR services, from payroll to talent management, delivered via the model that best suits their business needs: OnPremise, OnDemand, BPO (Business Process Outsourcing), or any combination thereof. Customers will continue to benefit from NorthgateArinso’s global delivery model and consultancy expertise, as well as its focus on innovation and commitment to delivering superior customer value.

“This deal is an important part of our plans to build the world’s number one provider of HR services, building on our existing strength and our focus on delivering excellent value for customers. Completing this deal today takes us a step closer to achieving that,” said Mike Ettling, Chief Executive of NorthgateArinso. “Since we announced the intention to acquire the HR Management division of Convergys we’ve received very positive feedback from customers and the wider marketplace.”

“Through the acquisition of Convergys’ HRM division, we’ve brought together great people, great technology and a world-class delivery model. This is a big step forwards in our mission to continually challenge, improve and transform how HR is delivered worldwide,” added Ettling.

About NorthgateArinso

NorthgateArinso is a leading global Human Resources software and services provider offering innovative HR business solutions to employers of all sizes, including global Fortune 500 companies and many public sector organizations. NorthgateArinso helps HR executives optimize their HR service delivery through smarter processes and more efficient technology, supporting key HR areas like workforce administration, payroll, benefits, recruitment, learning, and talent management.

NorthgateArinso’s 8,000 employees in 35 countries are dedicated to delivering HR excellence through HR consulting, HR outsourcing and HR technology.

Source: Northgatearinso.com

Computer hosting and network services provider Savvis Inc. said Tuesday it would spend $124.5 million to acquire privately held Canadian tech company Fusepoint Inc.

Fusepoint, which counts venture-capital firm M/C Venture Partners among its investors, manages information technology and has three data centers in Canada and more than 330 customers.

“The acquisition of Fusepoint is a step toward one of our most important goals to expand our geographic presence around the world,” Savvis Chairman and CEO Jim Ousley said in a statement.

Savvis, which is headquartered in St. Louis, plans to finance the deal with cash on hand and by increasing its revolving credit line with Wells Fargo Capital Finance LLC.

The deal is expected to be completed early this summer.

Source: http://www.businessweek.com

Paris, 1 June 2010 – Capgemini Financial Services, subsidiary of the Capgemini Group, one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, has just acquired Plaisir Informatique, a French company specializing in complex data migrations in the Banking & Insurance, sector, a major stakeholder in IT transformation.

Located in Ruoms in France’s Ardèche region, Plaisir Informatique employs 30 people and, since its inception in 1983, has developed competencies and data migration software tools that are recognized as being among the best-performing in the market. It has enabled numerous banks and insurance companies to generate substantial gains in profitability in the framework of their IT transformation programs. The data migration market is currently evolving fast, due to the numerous mergers and acquisitions, and the partial or total renewals of applications platforms and IT convergence programs taking place.

A key player in the deployment of large IT transformation programs in the Banking & Insurance sector, Capgemini is planning on bringing its new data migration solution to the French Banking & Insurance market, as well as to other sectors such as Pensions and Industry. Capgemini will also leverage Plaisir Informatique’s know-how with the development of a center of expertise dedicated to data migration in India in order to serve other markets.

“Our company has been built around the IT systems merger strategy of our health insurance company clients,” states Emile Baux, founder of Plaisir Informatique. “Joining a global leader will enable us to fully leverage our know-how and our experience to target new sectors.”

“Following the work we carried out together in 2001, this acquisition perfectly fits in with our desire to accompany large financial institutions throughout the entire value chain,” adds Olivier Le Henaff, Executive Director of Capgemini Financial Services France.

Source: http://www.capgemini.com

The BPO firm has been on a shopping spree with its second deal in a quarter.

Continuing with its M&A spree, Aditya Birla Minacs Worldwide Ltd (ABM), the business process outsourcing (BPO) arm of Aditya Birla Nuvo Ltd, has acquired Bureau of Collections Recovery (BCR), an accounts receivables management company in the US. This is its second acquisition in the last three months.

The acquisition has been done through its subsidiary in the US. Following this acquisition, BCR will now operate as a Minacs’ subsidiary, said a company statement. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

In March, Minacs acquired Compass BPO Ltd, a UK-based pureplay finance and accounting services provider. Earlier, it acquired Radifinity, a Bangalore-based startup providing technology solutions in radio frequency identification (RFID), smart cards, global positioning system (GPS) and GPRS in February.

Deepak Patel, CEO, Aditya Birla Minacs, said, in the statement, “BCR is a very strong operating model, with a consistently growing top and bottom line. Its capabilities are adjacent to Minacs’ core customer lifecycle services, and it will enhance our ability to deliver end-to-end solutions to our customers.”

BCR has been serving the credit industry segment for the last 25 years with clients in banking, financial services and telecom sectors. Marty Sarim, president and CEO, BCR, said, “The US debt collection industry alone is currently over $12 billion in size, and is expected to grow 12% CAGR. With Minacs’ global delivery platform, we will leverage our strength to focus our efforts toward winning larger opportunities in this market.” Following the deal, Sarim will take charge of the global practice leader for accounts receivables management at Minacs.

There have been quite a few global deals in the BPO space in recent times.  In one of the major inbound M&As in India, Sutherland Global Services, a transnational business process outsourcing (BPO) company, acquired Mumbai-based Adventity Global Services early this month. While in outbound deals, Intelenet Global Services acquired Firstinfo Ltd, and Patni Computer Systems Ltd acquired CHCS Services Inc.

Source: http://www.vccircle.com

By VICTOR GODINEZ

Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services, now a division of Xerox Corp., said Tuesday it has agreed to buy a business unit from Hewlett-Packard Co. for $125 million.

The ExcellerateHRO LLP unit, which helps companies manage their pension programs and other employee benefits, was originally owned by one of ACS’s old rivals, Plano-based Electronic Data Systems.

EDS was purchased in 2008 by HP.

The Excellerate purchase is ACS’s first since being acquired by Xerox. Rohail Khan, executive managing director of benefits outsourcing at ACS, said the deal will help ACS further expand into pension administration and other aspects of human resources outsourcing.

“It’s huge for us because it allows us to partner up with one of the major players in the benefit outsourcing space,” Khan said.

Khan declined to say how many employees the Excellerate division has, pending the deal’s closing, but said nearly all the existing workers are expected to make the transition to ACS.

As a standalone company, ACS was well-known for growing through acquisitions.

Khan said doing business with former competitors at EDS is unusual, but sometimes hard to avoid in an increasingly consolidated industry.

“We’re competitors, but this marketplace is really small,” he said. “There are only a couple players.”

Source: http://www.dallasnews.com

Based on this week’s HP announcements and last week’s IBM Impact conference, these two of the very largest, full-service, global IT vendors are betting — now that the recession has, at the least, bottomed out — that the extent of change now upon us is more than just another business cycle come full circle.

Far more, these vendors see that the recession has provided a catalyst for a much larger shift in how IT is done and delivered. It’s no coincidence that the interest in cloud computing and innovative IT sourcing options, for example, peaked when the recession was at its deepest.

The idea garnering wide attention in the darkest days was not just to save money by downsizing, but to also to start doing things very differently — to truly innovate, to change the very economics of IT. But now that the worst is over, simply saving money via old IT methods, I’ll wager, will prove a lot more expensive in real terms than rapidly investing in new ways of providing IT value as services.

That doesn’t mean that some enterprise IT organizations won’t try to go right back to business as usual. And some of the IT vendors, with their license auditors in tow, are counting on it.

It does mean that the enterprises that can actually change how they do and pay for IT in the post-recession economy may have an escalating advantage over those that do not.

Not the same old song and dance

HP this week announced the equivalent of a Swiss Army knife for IT transformation, with about as many blades and instruments as there are ways to attack the data center transformation gordian knot. The HP services, software, and sourcing offerings are designed to guide enterprises — from the starting points of their choosing — through a seismic transition from cost containment to IT innovation. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Last week, IBM boldly scooped up Cast Iron Systems, a cloud-to-IT integration engine maker, and further polished its view that the way to a smarter planet is via better business processes and a deep understanding of vertical industries, automation and how IT (with professional services) can bring them together. My colleague Tony Baer at Ovum delves into IBM’s recasting of the definition of business applications and acceptance of the partly cloudy future.

TIBCO this week at its annual user conference delivered a dozen major announcements and stepped even more boldly into cloud models, too. TIBCO’s “Enterprise 3.0″ vision emphasizes the importance of real-time and massive scale processing, an integrated development-to-deployment to business process management capability, and now the option of building out an enterprise private cloud to public cloud synergy using partners like Amazon Web Services. TIBCO is also embedding BI capabilities deeply across the portfolio. [Disclosure: TIBCO is a past-sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Oracle, for its part, made good on its “software, hardware, complete” vision via a cameo (and somewhat buffoon-like) appearance by Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison in the debut of the movie Iron Man 2 last week. Perhaps we should expect a fist-sized “arc reactor” for database appliances in the near future? Yet Oracle is also recently drinking deeply from the cloud well, given some its recent speeches by executives as it digests the Sun Microsystems acquisition.

The point is that these vendors know something big is up in IT, beyond business as usual. We’re seeing bold moves by them all, from acquisitions to restructuring to Hollywood-delivered group-think and not-so-subliminal brand imagery.

HP tackles the IT funding conundrum

HP is looking to actually help enterprises fund these transformative times. HP’s economic rationale for moving to innovation now goes beyond the need for swift and verifiable ROI in IT investments. Additionally, HP is banking on the high and painful costs of not being able to move well in dynamic markets, of incurring costs from inertia, rather than from investing for advancement.

Most urgently, IT cannot miss out in supporting businesses as they face rapid growth and savvy competitors across global markets, says HP.

More succinctly, HP’s message from this week’s announcements comes as a warning that going back to the old IT ways, of sliding back to the economics of expensive waste as a proxy for brittle peak reliability, risks missing the lessons of the recession.

HP is therefore taking a three-pronged approach to making adoption of innovations the new mantra of IT. The first approach finds way to deliver self-funding projects. The second leverages modern architecture and methodologies so IT organizations can quickly and easily add new functionality, making change the constant. The third approach shows how to freeing up funds trapped in on-going IT operations based on older IT economics.

As enterprises are faced with transformation from old to more modern IT, many are caught in an inertia of avoidance — frozen by the complexity and scale of the task, according to new research supported by HP. What’s needed is incremental change that pays for itself along the way, but which remains aligned with the strategic transformation and direction.

The HP focus on self-funding projects, therefore, includes offering qualified clients a complimentary, hands-on HP Applications Modernization Transformation Experience session that illustrates IT modernization and its benefits. The goal: By retiring legacy applications and eliminating complexity in technology environments, organizations are able to self-fund their modernization journeys.

Cost of lost opportunity

“The phrase ‘time is money’ rings true here, as 99 percent of organizations say that innovation gridlock cost them in lost time,” said Thomas E. Hogan, executive vice president of sales, marketing and strategy for HP Enterprise Business, in a release. “By breaking the innovation gridlock, organizations can regain time to market and capitalize on new opportunities.” More at www.hp.com/go/breakthegridlock2010.

According to research conducted on behalf of HP by Coleman Parkes Research:

• Some 95 percent of business and technology executives said innovation gridlock resulted in lost opportunities for their organizations.

• And 91 percent felt that innovation gridlock cost their organizations in lost effort (from resources). More data is available at www.hp.com/go/HPEnterpriseResearch2010.

Together the promise of cloud, the constraints of the recession, and the quick-paced requirements of modern business agility have conspired to expose the weaknesses of plain old IT … stack upon stack, brittle apps astride brittle apps, and rack by rack of under-utilized workloads alienated from their fit-for-purpose potential.

HP says the cost of doing nothing to transform IT is too great to ignore. IBM is transforming the very definition of business services and applications with plant-wide efficiencies in mind. TIBCO is refining software delivery that steps up to the cloud challenge. Oracle is enclosing its software in an optimized “iron” support infrastructure to improve performance to cost ratios dramatically.

All these vendors will still sell you the good old IT systems the good old ways. But they are also coming up with some big new tricks. Who will take them up on their hedge against a truly transformative IT future?

You may also be interested in:

• The Open Group’s Cloud Work Group advocates understanding of cloud-use benefits for enterprises
• Mutual embrace of SOA and cloud computing builds into productivity waltz across the IT landscape
• ArchiMate gives business leaders and architects a common language to describe how the enterprise works

By Associated Press

Information technology company CGI Group said Friday that it has agreed to buy Arlington County-based Stanley Inc. for $903 million in cash, or $37.50 per share.

The Canadian company is offering a premium of 29 percent over Stanley’s closing price Thursday of $29. The companies said that their boards have approved the sale and that Stanley directors and executives have pledged to vote their shares in support of the deal.

Stanley provides systems and professional services to the federal government. CGI said it will make Stanley part of its CGI Federal unit, which does business with defense, intelligence and other U.S. government agencies.

CGI will tender an offer for Stanley shares in the fall. It plans to pay for Stanley with cash on hand and funds from existing credit facilities. It expects the acquisition to add to its profit within the first year of closing.

CGI will need approval from antitrust regulators and Stanley shareholders to complete the deal.

The combined company would have $4.5 billion in annual revenue, CGI said. In January, Stanley forecast annual revenue of $868 million to $876 million.

Stanley shares are up about 30 percent since mid-February, when they were trading at annual lows.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

MANILA, Philippines—Property giant Ayala Land Inc. plans to build more business process outsourcing (BPO) hubs this year, boosting prospects for recurring office rental earnings that complement its shopping mall and residential businesses.

“Because of the recovery that we’re seeing, we have revived our plans for BPO expansion and we’re going to be launching this year another 120,000-130,000 square meters of new BPO space mostly in provincial locations,” ALI investor relations officer Alfie Reyes said in a briefing on Friday.

So far this year, ALI has launched BPO hubs in Iloilo and Baguio, offering 18,000 sq.m. in combined additional BPO space. With the recent pick-up in demand from BPO firms, however, the office property segment has been revitalized.

In the pipeline this year are new hubs in five more provincial locations and a couple more in Metro Manila, Reyes said.

In the first three months of this year, ALI’s office business segment posted a 3-percent rise in revenue to P466 million, with the expansion of the BPO office portfolio to a total of 258,001 sq.m. in gross leasable space as of end-March.

First-quarter office revenue was also boosted by higher average BPO lease rates, which rose by 11 percent to an average of P584 per square meter a month and improved occupancy levels of 66 percent against 50 percent a year ago.

The strategy on BPO is in line with the Ayala group’s expansion in all other property segments, particularly the residential business.

For this year, 15 to 20 new residential property projects are expected to be launched, Reyes said.

Because of the strong demand for residential property, ALI expects to be able to raise its selling prices this year by an average of 10-15 percent.

Reyes said ALI was upbeat on business prospects for this year. “Based on what we see, this year should be better than last year,” he said.

ALI posted a 32-percent profit growth in the first quarter to P1.2 billion from year-ago level.

Consolidated revenue for the first quarter reached P9.22 billion, up by 24 percent over a year ago. This was due to higher real estate revenue.

Source: business.inquirer.net

By Anthony Miller

News just in that US-headquartered, but essentially India-based SI, Cognizant, has struck its first M&A deal here in the UK, buying programme management consultancy, PIPC Group. PIPC was established in the UK in 1992 and also operates in the US, Australia and New Zealand across verticals in the private and public sector. PIPC has over 200 consultants and claims to be “managing over £3b of client projects at any one time”. We assume that is the value of the programmes under management rather than PIPC’s fees! No financial details were disclosed.

This is not the first time an Indian player has acquired a UK-based consultancy. Back in 2005, the ‘late’ Satyam bought buy-side financial services consultancy, Citisoft, for $39m. Citisoft then had nearly 60 consultants and generated $16m revenues with 12% net margin. Over the next several quarters Citisoft suffered high attrition, moribund growth and net losses as Satyam wrestled with integrating the company into its core business. By the way, Infosys had much the same problem when it first built its own consulting business from the ground up by hiring consultants from the ‘usual suspects’ (see our article on offshore consultancy in OffshoreViews Q4/2009 Quarterly Review).

This is not a no-brainer! The Indian players desperately need to boost their consulting propositions if they are ever to truly match the scale of Accenture and IBM, whom they hold as the benchmarks to beat. This is all about the Indians moving from the machine room to the board room, and the riches that then ensue (in theory, at least). But I remain to be convinced that acquisitions are the right way to go about it. As I have said many times before, the best chance for the Indians to beat the usual suspects in consulting is to change the rules of the game, as they have done for traditional IT services. A ‘me too but cheaper’ proposition just won’t wash. I explain more in that OffshoreViews note.

It has to be said that of all the India-based IT services players, Cognizant appears to be closer to the Accenture model than peers, so maybe it has a leg-up. But in the end, it’ll come down to trying to force-fit a prima-donna consulting culture into a well-oiled IT services delivery machine. Many have tried and most have failed (EDS/AT Kearney) or suffered extreme pain (Capgemini/E&Y Consulting). The odds are not stacked in Cognizant’s favour.

I will be speaking to Cognizant UK CEO, Sanjiv Gossain, later and will bring you more afterwards.

Related articles: Cognizant Acquires PIPC, a Global Program Management Consulting Firm. (www.marketwatch.com)

Source: techmarketview.com

“This acquisition further supports our strategy to expand our distribution of data center products into high-growth markets in Latin America. Building on our recently announced agreement to acquire Bell Microproducts, which also has a presence in Latin America, the addition of Tallard will add scale and scope in this growing region,” commented Phil Gallagher, president, Avnet Technology Solutions, Global. “Tallard’s value-added distribution model aligns with Avnet Technology Solutions’ strategy to deliver complete solutions that add more value and enable our partners to grow faster than the market.”

With more than 150 employees and an extensive reseller base, Tallard provides value-added services in 30 countries throughout Latin America, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Mexico and Venezuela. Its line card includes a portfolio of IT infrastructure products from leading vendors including Apple, Avaya, IBM, NetApp and Novell. For calendar year 2009, Tallard generated revenue of approximately US $250 million.

“This acquisition complements our focus on the data center and adds new suppliers that enhance our security and unified communications offerings in the region,” stated Jeff Bawol, president, Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas. “Building on the talents of Tallard’s skilled and technical sales team, we will be positioned to leverage our global supplier relationships and offer a broader suite of IT solutions and services to their existing customer base which, in turn, will accelerate our growth in this important region.”

The operations of Tallard Technologies will be integrated into Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas. The acquisition is expected to be immediately accretive to earnings and supports Avnet’s return on capital goals.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These statements are based on management’s current expectations and are subject to uncertainty and changes in facts and circumstances. The forward-looking statements herein include statements addressing future financial and operating results of Avnet and may include words such as “will,” “anticipate,” “expect,” believe,” and “should,” and other words and terms of similar meaning in connection with any discussions of future operating or financial performance or business prospects. Actual results may vary materially from the expectations contained in the forward-looking statements.

The following factors, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements: the Company’s ability to retain and grow market share and to generate additional cash flow, risks associated with any acquisition activities and the successful integration of acquired companies, any significant and unanticipated sales decline, changes in business conditions and the economy in general, changes in market demand and pricing pressures, any material changes in the allocation of product or product rebates by suppliers, allocations of products by suppliers, other competitive and/or regulatory factors affecting the businesses of Avnet generally.

More detailed information about these and other factors is set forth in Avnet’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Company’s reports on Form 10-K, Form 10-Q and Form 8-K. Avnet is under no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

About Tallard Technologies

Tallard Technologies is part of Itautec S.A. – Grupo Itautec, a publicly traded Brazilian company that specializes in the development of information technology and automation products and solutions. Tallard is Latin American’s largest value-added distributor and from its headquarters in Miami, Tallard manages its resellers throughout Central America and the Caribbean. Tallard has offices in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico and Venezuela.

About Itautec

Itautec S.A. — Grupo Itautec provides a complete line of products for the corporate and domestic market: microcomputers, servers, storage devices (data warehousing), automatic banking and sales machines, self-service and technical assistance, infrastructure, installations and outsourcing (managing information technology services). It has more than 5,000 employees distributed between its plant at Jundiai, Sao Paulo state, the administrative offices in the city of Sao Paulo, and 34 units and seven laboratories throughout Brazil. It also has subsidiaries in a number of countries.

About Avnet Technology Solutions

As a global solutions distributor, Avnet Technology Solutions collaborates with its customers and suppliers to create and deliver effective solutions that address the business challenges of their end-user customers locally and around the world. For fiscal year 2009, the group served customers in more than 30 countries and generated US $7.04 billion in annual revenue. Avnet Technology Solutions (www.ats.avnet.com) is an operating group of Avnet, Inc.

About Avnet

Avnet, Inc.  is one of the largest distributors of electronic components, computer products and embedded technology serving customers in more than 70 countries worldwide. Avnet accelerates its partners’ success by connecting the world’s leading technology suppliers with a broad base of more than 100,000 customers by providing cost-effective, value-added services and solutions. For the fiscal year ended June 27, 2009, Avnet generated revenue of US $16.23 billion. For more information, visit www.avnet.com. (AVT_IR)

Source: www.marketwatch.com

By Tony Baer

Go to any vendor conference and it gets hard to avoid what has become “The Obligatory Cloud Presentation” or “Slide.” It’s beyond this discussion to discuss hype vs. reality, but potential benefits like the elasticity of the cloud have made the idea too difficult to dismiss, even if most large enterprises remain wary of trusting the brunt of their mission systems to some external host, SAS 70 certification or otherwise.

So it’s not surprising that cloud has become a strategic objective for VMware and SpringSource — both before after the acquisition that brought them together. VMware was busy forming its vCloud strategy to stay a step ahead of rivals that seek to make VMware’s core virtualization hypervisor business commodity, while SpringSource acquired CloudFoundry to take its expanding Java stack to the cloud (even as such options were coming available for .NET and emerging web languages and frameworks like Ruby on Rails).

Following last summer’s VMware SpringSource acquisition, the obvious path would have placed SpringSource as the application development stack that would elevate vCloud from raw infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to a full development platform. That remains the goal, but it’s hardly the shortest path to VMware’s strategic goals.

At this point, VMware still is getting its arms around the assets that are now under its umbrella with SpringSource. As we speculated last summer, we should see some of the features of the Spring framework itself, such as dependency injection (which abstracts dependencies so developers don’t have to worry about writing all the necessary configuration files), applied to managing virtualization. But that’s for another time, another day.

VMware’s more pressing need is to make vSphere the de facto standard for managing virtualization and making vCloud, the de facto standard for cloud virtualization. (Actually, if you think about it, it is virtualization squared: OS instances virtualized from hardware, and hardware virtualized form infrastructure.)

In turn, Salesforce.com wants to become the de facto cloud alternative to Google, Microsoft, IBM, and when they get serious, Oracle and SAP. The dilemma is that Salesforce up until now has built its own walled garden. That was fine when you were confining this to CRM and third-party AppExchange providers who piggybacked on Salesforce’s own multi-tenanted infrastructure using its own proprietary Force.com environment with its “Java-like” Apex stored procedures language.

But at the end of the day, Apex is not going to evolve into anything more than a Salesforce.com niche development platform, and Force.com is not about to challenge Microsoft .NET, or Java for that matter.

The challenge is that Salesforce, having made the modern incarnation of remote hosted computing palatable to the enterprise mainstream, now finds itself in a larger fishbowl outgunned in sheer scale by Amazon and Google, and outside the enterprise, the on-premises Java mainstream. Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff conceded as much at the VMforce launch this week, characterizing Java as “the No. 1 developer language in the enterprise.”

So VMforce is the marriage of two suitors that each needed their own leapfrogs: VMware transitions into a ready-made cloud-based Java stack with existing brand recognition, and Salesforce.com steps up to the wider Java enterprise mainstream opportunity.

Apps written using the Spring Java stack will gain access to Force.com’s community and services such as search, identity and security, workflow, reporting and analytics, web services integration API, and mobile deployment. But it also means dilution of some features that make Force.com platform what it is; the biggest departure is away from the Apex language stored procedures architecture that runs directly inside the Salesforce.com relational database.

Salesforce pragmatically trades scalability of a unitary architecture for scalability through a virtualized one.

It really means that Salesforce morphs into a different creature, and now must decide whom it means to compete with because — it’s not just Oracle business applications anymore.

Our bets are splitting the difference with Amazon, as other SaaS providers like IBM that don’t want to get weighed down by sunk costs have already done. If Salesforce wants to become the enterprise Java platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) leader, it will have to ramp up capacity, and matching Amazon or Google in a capital investment race is a nearly hopeless proposition.

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

MOSCOW — Two large investors in the mobile phone industry in the former Soviet Union and former communist countries in Southeast Asia have consolidated their assets into a single sprawling company that is poised to become one of the largest emerging-market telecommunications operators.

While well positioned in these markets, the company, VimpelCom, is also deeply entangled in their legal and political risks, having emerged as a settlement of a long-running suit in Russia.

The Norwegian company Telenor and the telecommunications arm of the Russian financial and industrial conglomerate Alfa both held significant stakes in Russian and Ukrainian cellphone firms and had been sparring over matters of corporate governance.

To settle their dispute, the companies agreed to combine their assets into the new company. Its shares are scheduled to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.

Telenor announced the completion of the merger on Wednesday, fulfilling an agreement reached last October.

At the time, Telenor had faced the loss of its entire investment in Russia after a Siberian court seized its assets in Russia, and court bailiffs threatened to liquidate it at an auction. Instead of continuing the appeals, Telenor agreed with Alfa to consolidate assets into the joint venture.

As a condition of the settlement, the lawsuit was withdrawn. Still, Jon Fredrik Baksaas, the chief executive of Telenor, said in a phone interview Tuesday that the resolution was “balanced” and should not be characterized as “the result of pressure.”

The new company combines the second-largest mobile phone operator in Russia, Beeline, and the largest operator in Ukraine, Kyivstar, and operators in half a dozen other former Soviet countries as well as Vietnam and Cambodia.

VimpelCom will serve about 90 million subscribers. In New York, its shares will replace the similarly named VimpelCom, which had previously operated only Russia’s Beeline brand.

Telenor will now hold 36 percent of the voting rights and 39.6 percent of the economic interest in the new company, while Altimo will hold 44.7 percent of the voting rights and 39.2 percent of the economic interest, Telenor said in a statement.

Though prospects for subscriber growth is limited — as nearly everybody in the region who wants a cellphone now has one — the company will focus on mobile Internet services.

The business venture had for years been overshadowed by the drawn-out legal battle. Though billions of dollars were at stake, the case had been shunted to tiny and remote Siberian courtrooms where one judge handed down a ruling after midnight.

The settlement forming the new VimpelCom extricated Telenor from the potential loss of its business in Russia, but left unresolved the broader concerns about corruption and weak property rights in Russia. The new firm will be incorporated in Bermuda, based in the Netherlands and governed by American law.

Source: NYTimes.com

“We like the bigger plays; we’re not going to buy smaller companies, per se,” he said, “although we may look at niche players.”

Lasher said CSC has directed its sights across various Latin American markets, though Mexico has generated the most interest.

“The markets we’re most interested in are Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Argentina,” he said. “We’re already active in those markets. But the kind of scale that we have in Brazil now is what we would like to have elsewhere.”

Lasher could not provide further details on CSC’s acquisition negotiations.

BRAZIL DEVELOPMENTS

US consultancy firm BearingPoint announced in March last year it was in negotiations with its Latin America management teams to sell its operations in the region. CSC subsequently completed the acquisition of the company’s Brazilian operations in August.

At the time of the acquisition, CSC and BearingPoint Brazil collectively had 75-100 accounts in the Brazilian market.

Lasher said CSC Brazil has since won contracts in the “key” vertical markets of telecommunications, utilities and natural resources. The company has focused on implementations of SAP (NYSE: SAP) ERPs, with the bulk of the work coming in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

The banking sector represents another growth area in the Brazilian market, according to the executive, who noted that CSC also has small operations in capital Brasília.

“We’re quite bullish about what’s going on in Brazil,” he said. “We think the political climate there is stable, in spite of the fact that elections are coming up this year. We think the economy is stable and good.”

COMPETITION

Within Latin America, CSC will be looking this year to capture large outsourcing and infrastructure and application management business. Other areas of focus include ERP implementations and technology consulting, as well as industry-specific solutions.

The company also plans to roll out new solutions into the Latin American market, namely SOA, BPM and cloud computing services.

CSC is going head-to-head with a mixture of large multinationals and more regional players. Within SAP implementations, CSC tends to compete more with IBM (NYSE: IBM) and US consulting and technology services company Accenture (NYSE: ACN), while Spanish systems integrator Indra tends to focus more on defense-related projects, Lasher said.

Chilean systems integrator Sonda represents another top competitor, especially in the government and financial services sectors.

CSC’s Latin American presence includes operations in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Peru and Mexico. The company is serving roughly 60 clients in the region.

“Growing the number of clients is not a high priority,” he said. “Growing the business with our existing clients is probably more important, and then winning incremental clients is secondary.”

Globally, CSC has more than 92,000 employees and raked in US$16bn in sales last year.

Source: http://www.bnamericas.com

Vistaprint Jamaica Limited, six years into its operation in Montego Bay, has acquired approximately 4.4 hectares (11 acres) of land at Fairfield on the north-western tip of the city to establish a new base, but is yet to determine when the facility will be built.

The call-centre company currently rents space at/from the Montego Bay Free Zone.

Vistaprint did not disclose the value of the acquisition, but land in that area typically sells at around $20 million per acre.

The land was purchased from Mark Kerr-Jarrett’s Barnett Estate Limited, and forms part of the technology park that Kerr-Jarrett is in the process of developing.

“We cannot discuss overall monetary figures at this time as there are a number of things still in the planning stages, as are the estimated start and completion dates,” Jeff Esposito, public relations manager of the parent operation, told the Financial Gleaner.

Vistaprint Jamaica, a subsidiary of United States-based Vistaprint NV, has already hired Neustone Limited from Kingston as project manager to get the 90,000 square foot customer design and support centre built.

The centre was designed by American architects, Kingsland Scott Bauer Associates, which operates from Pittsburgh.

Vistaprint Jamaica, which is run by General Manager Roger Williams, currently has 350 employees on its payroll. The company handles 700,000 orders via phone and email per quarter, Esposito said, for clients such as OfficeMax, Viking Direct and FedEx.

“We do expect the head count to continue to expand as the company expands, much like it has done in the past,” Esposito said.

Vistaprint is the first company to have bought space in the US$352 million technology park.

“Vistaprint is a very well-known and successful company and we believe that their presence would promote the technology park in attracting like businesses,” Kerr-Jarrett told the Financial Gleaner.

He, too, declined to disclose the value of the land deal.

“They got a very good price for it. It was very aggressively priced,” he said.

The development, which is called Barnett Tech Park, is located on 100 acres of former sugar cane lands in the Fairfield area of Montego Bay. Kerr-Jarrett said the park would be developed in two phases, with phase one comprising 48 acres of land.

Buildings for leasing

He is investing US$2 million in infrastructure work on the land, which commenced in November and will be completed later this year.

Construction of buildings for leasing is priced at US$350 million, to be completed in three to five years.

Kerr-Jarrett, who is developing the park with another partner, whom he declined to name, said some nine to 10 lots would be made available to investors with the lots being 11 acres in size.

On completion and occupation, the park could employ some 8,000 persons.

“We really believe that in order to expand the economy, the communication and Information Technology industry is one we must pursue,” he said.

“Our location to the United States and the fact that we have the same time zone, speak English and we have an educated population, makes it a natural fit,” he further explained.

Esposito said the new Montego Bay location is expected to drive growth in the Jamaican market for the company, which specializes in providing customised marketing products and services for small businesses.

The current operation in Montego Bay is the home for its English language customer service and design services operations, which includes phone and email support for customers in places the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom.

Source: www.jamaica-gleaner.com

Jonathan Rosenberg, CEO of CCT Group Limited (CCTG) reports that the company has made a significant acquisition, that of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida-based Interactive Response Technologies, Inc. (IRT).

IRT provides contact-center and BPO services, with a workforce of 2,700 in Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma. Its acquisition almost triples the size of CCTG, which is a leading contact-center and BPO investment portfolio company.

I interviewed Jonathan late in 2009, after meeting him at a conference in the Clark technology area north of Manila.
Remarking on this new development, he said the transaction “provides our group with a substantial onshore USA presence, with excellent facilities and a talented and experienced management team.” He added that IRT “perfectly complements our offshore portfolio presence.”

With the said acquisition, CCTG will add to its subsidiaries existing clients, blue-chip base of Fortune 100 clients and customers in the areas of financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, insurance, retail, transportation, utility, and education industries.

IRT’s services include “customer service, sales, technical support, customer loyalty and retention, acquisition and business-to-business programs,” according to Jonathan.

CCTG’s acquisition of the US-based IRT is just the latest example of how global sourcing investments are not a one-way street. In fact, investors from many corners of the world are creating a truly global business model and community. Within this community, the Philippines has emerged as the number two outsourcing country in the world (after India), and is the leader when it comes to contact-center and related services. The Clark area alone, which counts Cyber City Teleservices as one of its residents, generates about $2 billion annually (in a country in which the entire federal budget is $30 billion).

Source: search.sys-con.com