Source: www.marketwatch.com

IBM and kika/Leiner Group today announced that the furniture retailer has signed an agreement for the global support of its information technology (IT) infrastructure with IBM in Austria. The contract will run for 5 years until 2013.

The kika/Leiner Group has been growing rapidly in Central and Eastern Europe. Today, there are locations in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Hungary and the number of locations is still increasing. In 2008, kika/Leiner has plans to open kika stores in Bucharest, Romania, Serbia and in Moscow, Russia. In 2007, kika opened stores in Saudi Arabia, through franchising agreements, and has plans to also expand its presence even further.

In order to keep the IT growing in line with the quick international expansion, kika/Leiner chose IBM Austria to support its IT-infrastructure. A key element for IBM winning this deal was its flexibility and global presence, as Paul Koch, CEO of kika/Leiner Group, points out, “In all of our international locations, we require availability and security to be guaranteed. This can be provided by IBM, whose international expertise is very valuable for us.”

Kika/Leiner’s centralized data center is headquartered in St. Poelten and supplies all its locations with IT services. These locations work with Thin Clients, which are connected to the data center through a secure network. IBM supports and manages the servers in St. Poelten, ensures the network connections globally by partnering with the Austrian telecommunications company Telekom Austria, keeps LAN and WAN up-to-date and runs their security applications. In addition, the IBM helpdesk provides kika/Leiner employees, in all its country locations, with daily support.

The centralized datacenter concept helps kika/Leiner to quickly implement in new locations. To set up the IT and support in new stores and countries, IBM will establish the network connection and link it with the datacenter in St.Poelten.

The IT outsourcing agreement was signed in July of 2008.

Strong: www.ciol.com

BANGALORE, INDIA: Outsourcing, consulting and IT services provider Capgemini, today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Getronics PinkRoccade (GPR), for the acquisition of its business application services BV (BAS BV).

According to the company, this acquisition amounts to an equity value of €255 million paid in cash on Capgemini-owned resources.

The transaction should be finalized by the end of the year, subject to the approval of the European Commission and to the consultation of the relevant Workers’ Council.

This division regroups the GPR’s application service activities in Netherlands. Through this acquisition, Capgemini will reinforce its position in the key markets, while developing a stable portfolio of long-term applications management contracts in the public sector, said a press release.

The BAS BV service had a turnover of close to €300 million in 2007 and employs 2,200 professionals working on more than 600 projects.

Among its clients, it counts some major names in the Dutch public sector such as planning organizations, large State administrations and social security bodies as well as major players in the insurance and banking world.

“The strong synergies which exist between BAS BV and Capgemini open up some great windows on a longstanding market which is also one of the Group’s most profitable,” underlines Paul Hermelin, chief executive officer, Capgemini. “Moreover, this acquisition fits perfectly into both Capgemini’s strategy and the Intimacy stream of our i3 conquest plan.”

According to Erik van der Meijden, chief executive officer, Getronics, “Joining Capgemini will bring to both clients and BAS employees the stability of a large-scale multinational group in our areas of expertise, which is also strongly implicated and recognized in the Dutch market.”

Lazard and Rabo Securities are Capgemini’s advisors for this transaction while Clifford Chance and Latham and Watkins act as legal advisors to Capgemini.

Source: www.australianit.news.com.au

INDIAN outsourcer Infosys is expecting strong revenue growth over the next year, and is geared up for an “explosion” of work in banking and business process outsourcing.

Local chief executive Gary Ebeyan expects business process outsourcing work to double in the next year, while core banking revenues could grow rapidly if the company succeeds in several bids.

“We have four BPO customers and we are probably in negotiation with another six or seven on top of that, and we expect that to increase,” Mr Ebeyan said.

“The Finacle core banking platform will be explosive.”

The National Australia Bank has shortlisted Infosys along with Oracle for its billion-dollar core systems overhaul, but Mr Ebeyan declined to comment on these discussions.

He also expects growth of between 20 and 30 per cent in its “bread and butter” enterprise application business, which includes application development and legacy application maintenance.

In the financial year ending March 31, 2008, Infosys recorded revenues of $159 million, up 24 per cent on the previous year.

This figure is only for work performed in Australia, and doesn’t include revenue generated by offshore work on local projects.

Infosys’s annual profit grew by 41 per cent to $28.9 million.

The company is well positioned to service the growing market for business process outsourcing, having appointed a local practice head last year.

Mr Ebeyan said Infosys started investing heavily in its core banking product two to three years ago.

“We hired a consulting team, which did a gap analysis of the market and where Finacle was, and we now have the roadmap to carry out those changes.”

Infosys employed between 900 and 1200 staff, depending on the workload, and this would probably grow by 20-30 per cent, Mr Ebeyan said.

Rival outsourcer Satyam is building a 2000-seat facility in Geelong and has a goal of hiring 1400 people over the next four years, a large number of whom would be local graduates.

Mr Ebeyan said Infosys’s strategy did not include hiring a large number of local graduates.

“We aim to recruit a smaller number of high-calibre graduates who we can fast-track to a higher value role, such as architecture or program management. That’s what we focus on, rather than getting 100 graduates and using them as programmers.”

The company sent about 10 students a year to its 1 million square metre training facility in Mysore, India.

“We have the largest training institute in the southern hemisphere in Mysore, where we can house and train 10,000 people at a time,” Mr Ebeyan said.

“They can actually learn our processes and see the organisation at its root level, and it also gives them opportunities to work on global delivery for global clients.”

Source: www.dnaindia.com

Vivek Seal(New Dehli)-American IT firm Hewlett-Packard is predicting a big boom in India’s animation industry with companies now willing to move away from outsourcing projects from the US and Europe to their own co-productions.

Anurag Gupta, country manager (workstations, personal systems group), Hewlett-Packard India, said the entry of domestic firms into co-production is luring international giants such as Walt Disney to the country.

HP’s workstations were used to make numerous Hollywood blockbuster animation flicks such as Shrek, Bee Movie and Kung Fu Panda. He said about 70 non-mythological animation feature films are in the pre-production and production phases in India. They are scheduled to be completed in the next two-four years. Production houses such as Reliance Big Entertainment and Yash Raj Films have already announced plans to expand in the sector.

Industry estimates peg the cost of making an animation film at $15-20 million. IT and BPO trade body Nasscom projects that the animation market in India will touch $950 million by 2009.

Terming Nasscom’s estimates an “optimistic approach,” he said a 35-40% growth in this industry was “definitely possible”.

Source: www.ndtvprofit.com

With global pharma companies leveraging IT to cut costs, Indian technology firms such as TCS, Satyam, Patni and Cognizant are now stepping up presence in life science space.

“Increasing costs of R&D, coupled with low productivity and poor bottom lines, have forced major pharma companies worldwide to outsource part of their data management activities to low-cost countries, thereby saving costs and time in the process,” TCS Vice President and Global Head - Life Sciences and Healthcare ISU - Debashis Ghosh said.

Indian IT companies have been helping life sciences organisations with services ranging from application development, maintenance, testing and upgrade to global roll out and implementation, he added.

The country’s largest software exporter TCS earns about 5.3 per cent of its revenue from the life science processes.

According to a research firm Life Science Insights (LSI), worldwide IT spending for the life science sector would reach 38.9 billion dollar by the end of 2008, driven by the need to tackle regulatory burdens and costly clinical trials, and by life sciences companies leveraging IT to enable personalized medicine.

“With data growth fast outpacing the growth in the infrastructure capabilities of life science companies, it has become a necessity to outsource key activities related to storing, accessing, securing, and managing of data.

“This, coupled with the regulatory compliance, is driving the IT intervention amongst the life science companies,” Cognizant Life Sciences Practice Leader J Sairamkumar said.

Pharmaceutical companies are expanding Post-Market Drug Safety Initiatives to prevent adverse reactions. This is because of heightened public awareness of drug safety, greater regulatory scrutiny, a number of recent drug withdrawals and black box warnings, industry experts said.

Out of the several processes, the adverse event case processing is becoming a fast growing service stream.

Adverse event reporting relates to tracking changes in health or side effects that occurs in a person who participates in a clinical trial while he is receiving treatment or within specified period.

It is a computerised information database designed to support the FDA’s post-marketing safety surveillance program for all approved drug and therapeutic biologic products.

Patni which is a major player in the life science process outsourcing space said adverse event case processing is a growing service stream.

“This is a fairly young but rapidly growing segment of Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) where apart from technologists, we are inducting doctors, pharmacists and even nurses who bring understanding of medicare processes and help in extending services,” Patni Senior Vice-President and Head Sanjiv Kapur said.

Adverse Event case processing outsourcing is complex and is part of KPO. As per various market estimates, KPO is expected to grow to 17 billion dollar by end of 2010 and will employ about 2,50,000 professionals, he added.

Another IT major Satyam Computer Services had recently formed an alliance with a Westborough-based life science KPO company Sciformix Corporation to deliver data management services in Pharmacovigilance.

Both the companies would collaborate to enable pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to better monitor the safety of the products they market by offering services across the safety management spectrum, ranging from case intake to international regulatory reporting.

With drug safety being listed as a front and center concern for 2008 for life sciences organisations by Health Industry Insights (January 2008), many more outsourcing deals are likely to come to the Indian IT firms.