Monthly Archives: January 2011

Egypt’s crisis: where social media threatens global outsourcing

January 30th, 2011

When the first response of the government, in times of political crisis, is to shut down the Web, this has a massive impact on the nation’s global sourcing infrastructure to support global businesses.

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Procurement BPO: Be careful before sharing your proverbial corporate bedroom with another party

January 30th, 2011

In Part II of our Procurement BPO market appraisal with SpendMatters’ Jason Busch, we get straight to the heart of the issues that buyers need to watch out for when evaluating a Procurement BPO endeavour. Essentially, you’re going to be sharing your proverbial corporate bedroom with a service provider, so you may be wise to read this first

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They may take away our lives, but they’ll never take… OUR LAWYERS!

January 30th, 2011

It’s remarkable how quickly an outsourcing concept can spiral from concept to reality, when the ability to achieve real cost-savings is augmented by accessing insights and flexible resources. And that’s exactly what’s been going on with Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO)

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Will India’s desire for short-term profit trump the need to re-invest beyond the current market spike?

January 26th, 2011

You won’t see a CEO being removed after achieving a double-digit growth rate too often, but that’s just what happened, when Wipro’s co-chiefs Suresh Vaswani and Girish Paranjpe stepped down last week

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Let’s cut through the fluff and discover what’s really going in the sourcing industry

January 25th, 2011

The “Amazing Horse Race” is the ultimate public bloodbath of the sourcing industry, as the “Buy team” defends the title it gloriously won last year in Edinburgh. However this time it’s not going to be quite as easy…

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Learn what 1,000 of your colleagues really think about Cloud Business Services

January 24th, 2011

HfS Research, in partnership with the Outsourcing Unit of the London School of Economics, is hosting a webinar, sponsored by Accenture, featuring the key findings from the groundbreaking study of Cloud Business Services.

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Are you ready to turn on… to HfS research dot com?

January 23rd, 2011

A few memories from the HfS team, as we ready for something just a little bit special, coming very soon to a laptop near you. And ask yourself – are you ready?

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Join us for a webinar with CFO Magazine: Which Cloud is right for you?

January 21st, 2011

On Thursday, January 27, we’ll join CFO Editor-In-Chief Scott Liebs and Susan Cramm, the founder and president of Valuedance. We’ll give you a glimpse at some of our data from our Cloud Business Services study, in additional to helping you get the lowdown on your Cloud options

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Latin America: The Next Sourcing Frontier or an Afterthought?

January 18th, 2011

We’ve been encouraged to see many providers paying more than lip service to Latin America as a region for growth and business opportunity. Previously the un-loved stepchild of the outsourcing geographies, Latin America does hold promise for those who approach it the right way—and there is more than one right way to approach it.

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Scott Golas, MadMan of digital media outsourcing

January 15th, 2011

Centro is taking the function of advertising-process sourcing to an entirely new level with a new managed services offering, called MediaOps, that will enable advertisers to outsource their entire digital media operations, which are typically onerous to run, and complex to get right. This will allow the ad agencies to focus their talents on creative and targeted ad campaign management.

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Expecting more from Procurement BPO? SpendMatters and HfS investigate

January 13th, 2011

The struggle with procurement BPO has typically been the belief that either moving labor from higher to lower cost regions, or re-badging employees from corporate to a BPO provider, would alone be enough to achieve results. To tackle the issue we teamed up with HfS Expert Contributor, Jason Busch of SpendMatters fame. Jason also assumes the role of senior advisor for the coveted HfS Single malt Foundation, where he has excelled in his duties.

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Farewell to Joe Vales, a sourcing legend

January 12th, 2011

We were very saddened to learn that Joe Vales passed away this morning

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2011: The Year your provider vies to be your service integrator. Will you play ball?

January 12th, 2011

Europe’s Logica begins its New Year by inking an intriguing partnership with Microsoft. What, at first glance, looks like a rather mundane partnership really signals something else: That its going to be the business driving Cloud—Logica gets this and so does Microsoft. And each needs the other.

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Build it, then market it… and then they may come

January 12th, 2011

“Build it and they will come” is not a viable approach to achieve shared services scale in most organizations. Business line stakeholders may not perceive a burning platform for change, fear loss of control, believe that their back offices are too integral to the creation of their profit margin, have other options such as outsourcing on their own, or remember a similar initiative way back when that, in their minds, was a dismal failure. Think of selling shared services as getting friends to eat sushi…

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iGate swallows larger Patni—does it matter?

January 10th, 2011

As far as mergers go, this is a fairly synergistic one: a high-growth, innovative company acquires a bigger but staid, stuck competitor

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TPI + Compass: a new direction for outsourcing advisors, or more of the same?

January 8th, 2011

With the increased focus on outsourcing advisory services from management consultants such as Deloitte, KPMG and PwC, the souped-up TPI/Compass creates a super-boutique that can compete effectively in the market for the complex enterprise engagements that require a lot of hourly-billable heavy-lifting. There’s little doubt this merger helps bolster TPI’s credentials as a serious player, now the big boys fancy their piece of the action. However, when we look at the current enterprise needs for outsourcing support, we see a dire need for enterprises to receive a mixture of consulting advice and data, served up in a less expensive, easier-to-digest format, than the $500-per-hour model.

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Are BPO newcomers running out of gas?

January 5th, 2011

The very latest market picture of Finance & Accounting BPO sends us one very clear message: the market remains dominated by a small handful of established service providers, while the market entrants of recent years have struggled to make a major impact.

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Happy Sourcing Change year: first fix what is inexcusable and downright awful

January 2nd, 2011

HfS are forecasting a meteorologist’s dream for the sourcing industry— high pressure combinations of Cowboys and Indians, a blizzard of new deals, and very Cloud-y days. In the face of these anticipated patterns, how should buyers prepare for the stormy weather that ultimately impacts results for their organizations? Perhaps it’s time to prepare for the change sourcing represents a bit differently. Here are our top five recommendations for staying warm and dry in 2011

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