Search through our UKHotViews and UKHotViewExtra articles plus complete research reports
We recently caught up with the Stephen Leece, Practice Leader for the Public Sector markets at Esri UK. For those readers who haven’t heard of Esri they are a provider of GIS mapping software and associated services (maintenance, hosting, professional services).
FY11 turnover for Esri UK stood at £45m representing growth of c4%. The majority of Esri's UK revenue is attributable to the public sector and it is managing a respectable level of growth despite the difficulties in the market. Indeed, in 2012 Leece states Esri is managing to grow its central government business by 20%.
In TechMarketView's latest PublicSectorViews' note - Esri: 'Mapping the UK public sector' , Georgina O'Toole, considers the secret to Esri's recent UK public sector success and highlights why Esri's management team should be keeping a close eye on the competition.
Posted by Georgina O'Toole at '17:17' - Tagged: publicsector gis software
A year ago we launched the TechMarketView Little British Battler initiative which aimed to give small, UK-owned software and IT services companies a leg-up in the market. The dozen companies who participated in our inaugural event tell us that being a TechMarketView Little British Battler materially helped raise their profile and attracted interest in their business from all quarters.
We are delighted to announce that we are now looking for the next tranche of Little British Battlers to go through the process, culminating in our second Little British Battler event to be held on Tuesday 12th February 2013. At this event, CEOs of the selected ‘Little British Battlers’ will have the opportunity to meet members of TechMarketView’s research team, ‘one-on-one’, to present their company’s products and services and gain valuable, constructive feedback.
We will also feature the selected companies in TechMarketView UKHotViews, the most highly regarded source of daily commentary on the UK IT scene, and in a special research report which will be distributed to ‘movers and shakers’ in the industry.
The event will be held in London and there is no fee involved.
So, if you are the CEO of small, UK-owned software or IT services company punching above its weight, and are interested in participating, please submit your details by clicking here. If you tried for our first event and were unsuccessful, you need to register again to have another chance to participate.
The deadline to register your interest is Monday 26th November and we will be sending out pre-qualification forms and further information by the end of November. Successful companies will be notified in early January.
This is a rare opportunity to get your company on the radar of the UK’s premier software and IT services research firm, and gain a level of market exposure which frankly money can’t buy!
Candidate companies must be privately held, headquartered in the UK (not subsidiaries of foreign firms), and have annual revenues typically under £25m.
Don’t delay – you must register your interest by 26th November to be eligible to participate.
Posted by HotViews Editor at '00:00' - Tagged: lbb
We attended two European BPS vendor events this week held by IBM and Cognizant, which provided us with some very interesting comparators between the two companies - IBM as a BPS industry incumbent and Cognizant as a new breed of BPS challenger.
What came across loud and clear from both vendors is that cost reduction is the very baseline expectation today. What clients really want are services aligned against their own business outcomes, which vary from industry to industry, and often client by client. This makes for a challenging marketplace that requires increasing specialism and differentiation. It is pushing both vendors to move into higher value areas such as business process analytics, outcome-based contracting and Business Process-as-a- Service (BPaaS). But there are some important differences between their approaches.
Subscribers to TechMarketView’s Foundation Service can read the analysis in UKHotViewsExtra here.
Posted by John O'Brien at '08:14' - Tagged: bpo bpaas bps
In reviewing the happenings in local government during 2011/2012, one would be forgiven for thinking that local authorities are being mandated by the Cabinet Office to adhere to the UK Government ICT Strategy. Of course that is not the case. But, never before has the direction taken by local authorities been more closely aligned with the wishes of the UK Government CIO.
We have seen local authorities considering the establishment of mutuals; the adoption of true shared services; acceptance of ‘Bring Your Own Technology’; channel shift; and a move to cloud technologies. But, as always in local government, one size doesn’t fit all, and the direction and speed of travel varies depending on the authority (and on the personalities in charge).
In this latest report from the PublicSectorViews team, Georgina O'Toole takes an in-depth look at developments in the UK local government SITS market and outlines TechMarketView's forecasts for the market through to 2015. Subscribers to the PublicSectorViews stream can download the report here, everyone else should contact Deb Seth to find out how to gain access.
Posted by Georgina O'Toole at '18:02' - Tagged: publicsector localgovernment markettrends forecasts
Nasscom, the industry association for Indian offshore services suppliers, has softened its already muted view on the growth prospects for the sector.
Back in February, Nasscom had forecast that ‘export revenues’ (i.e. for offshore IT and business process services) would grow 11-14% in FY13 (to 31st March 2013). This compares with the 16% growth achieved in FY12, which valued Indian offshore IT/BP services at some $69bn. Nasscom is now expecting offshore services growth to reach ‘at least’ double-digit growth, the lower end of its prior forecast, setting offshore revenues at $75-77bn.
Eligible TechMarketView subscription service clients can read our analysis of this downgrade in the latest edition of OffshoreViews right here, right now!
Posted by HotViews Editor at '15:38' - Tagged: offshore
UK Application Services has not been the most comfortable of sectors to do business within over the last 12 months or so and it is not going to get any easier. Suppliers are faced with the need to invest up front to expand service lines, at the same time that a range of pressures (from the economy to the deflationary cloud model) are putting more and more pressure on revenues.
UK/European/US suppliers like IBM, HP, Capgemini, (CGI)Logica, Steria and Atos, are still under threat from offshore providers such as TCS and Infosys who are moving up the value chain and acquiring more UK market share despite facing growth challenges of their own. New entrants are emerging onto the market, from start-ups focused on high growth areas such as cloud, mobile, social and big data, to telco providers like NTT and T-Systems with their emerging application services units and natural cloud affinity. The threat from the new entrants should not be underestimated – established vendors are facing a wave of innovation from more start-ups than they can track. For example, a recruitment milk round held in “Silicon Roundabout” in London this weekend was packed with companies offering solutions and services around big data and social networking. Cloud and mobile were not a specific focus – because they are now base line assumptions. The market has indeed moved. Established suppliers cannot rely on their current market position to ensure ongoing success - leads are being neutralised, parts of the marketplace being reset.
Subscribers to TechMarketView ESASViews can read the Application Services Supplier Landscape 2012-2013 report here. If you would like to subscribe, Deborah Seth (dseth@techmarketview.com) will be happy to help.
Posted by Angela Eager at '10:00' - Tagged: cloud socialcare mobility bigdata applications
Support services players are evolving to become more involved in the transformation of their clients’ front line service delivery, to make them more efficient, more productive and more competitive. The use of technology has a big part to play in this – a shift which is driving convergence between what we call ‘IT-enabled support services’ (ITeSS) and our core business process services (BPS) space.
Names like Serco, Capita, Mouchel and G4S will be very familiar to suppliers in the UK BPS market. But new and unusual suspects like Carillion, Mitie, Balfour Beatty, Enterprise, Amey, Babcock and Interserve in the construction and front line support services markets are also playing in this space.
ITeSS tend to target management and mid-office activities. For instance, ITeSS software platforms and business process re-engineering (BPR) can be used to transform some of the more time consuming management and administration activities involved in front line services delivery, like job allocation, maintenance scheduling, and reporting. Mobile devices can then help front line workers manage their time and work more effectively.
We see an emerging market for ITeSS as support services and IT/BP suppliers partner to capitalise on new outsourcing opportunities, particularly in public sector areas like health, Police and local government. These markets are far more likely to outsource in ‘bite-size chunks’, and seek multi-vendor sourcing rather than pursue the single-supplier mega-deals of the past. For suppliers, ITeSS presents an opportunity to specialise and differentiate from the competition.
Subscribers to TechMarketView’s BusinessProcessViews research stream can read our analysis of the ITeSS supplier market opportunities, with market size and forecasts, in our new report IT-enabled support services: opportunities in a converging market.
Posted by John O'Brien at '08:07' - Tagged: bpo bps supportservices ITeSS
Software and IT services providers are tripping over themselves to bring enterprise social platforms to the market but there is little revenue to show for their efforts. Enterprises are not that keen on investing in social networking technology for internal use because of unanswered questions around the business case – i.e. what is social media good for - and ROI.
Some of those questions are starting to be addressed with the emerging wave of enterprise social platforms that combine social capabilities with business context and decision making and then go one step further towards execution when they are embedded within line of business applications and business processes. As part of the ongoing social media coverage in the ESASViews research stream (see Social Media: the business imperative), TechMarketView subscribers can read about the latest social moves by Atos/blueKiwi, SAP and Infor in HotViewsExtra here.
Posted by Angela Eager at '13:24' - Tagged: socialmedia software itservices
October turned out to be an eventful month for the IT industry and, as ever, TechMarketView was called upon by national and trade media to give our usual pointed opinion on the events that have the potential to change the shape of the sector.
Arguably the most anticipated – and heavily previewed – of these events were the launch of Microsoft Windows 8 and of the Apple iPad mini, coupled with the ejection of Apple execs Scott Forstall and John Browett (see our UKHotViews comment here). On this latter event, TechMarketView chairman Richard Holway was once again quoted in The Times (see Apple’s new king Tim Cook deletes squabbling bosses), and a few days earlier on Windows 8 (see Microsoft unveils Windows 8, the latest radical overhaul of its operating system).
Expressing her opinions about Windows 8 to Channelweb was TechMarketView’s ESAS (Enterprise Software & Application Services) research director, Angela Eager (see Onlookers predict muted enterprise uptake of Windows 8). You can see more of Angela’s Windows 8 commentary on UKHotViews (see Windows 8: saviour or sinker?).
But Apple and Microsoft were not the only IT players to hit the headlines. Recovering UK-headquartered business process services firm Xchanging won back a key contract at BAE Systems from ‘the late’ Logica (see UKHotViews here) about which TechMarketView research director John O’Brien was interviewed by The Times (see Taking over Logica just got tougher). John was also quoted in Computerworld on Xchanging’s significant contract renewal at Lloyds of London (and see UKHotViews here).
Meanwhile, the news that Facebook EMEA exec Joanna Shields is to become CEO of London’s Tech City Investment Organisation (see UKHotViews here) garnered another quote from Richard Holway in Techworld (see Facebook facing executive brain drain?).
If you want to be able to see everything we have written about any of these companies on UKHotViews then you’ll need access to the archive – and Deb Seth on our client services team will be happy to tell you what that involves.
Posted by HotViews Editor at '08:48'
When we met London-based information management consultancy Coactiva Aspiren early this year (see here), we found a company that was punching well above its weight, winning business against the likes of IBM, KPMG, Northgate, Experian and Equifax. Its innovative solutions, including business intelligence and performance management software, and advanced data analytics, had already proved popular with UK local authorities in particular. Following investment in product development, the management team had ambitions to move into adjacent markets
We recently caught up with Coactiva’s CEO Ray Fielding and Sales Director James Hilton to see what progress has been made in 2012. Eligible TechMarketView subscription service clients can read more here.
Posted by HotViews Editor at '07:51' - Tagged: lbb
