EDS Signs Global IT Services Contract with SR Technics

For release: 21 Feb 2008

PLANO, Texas and Zurich, Switzerland – EDS today announced a six-year, information technology (IT) services agreement with SR Technics, one of the world’s leading independent providers of technical services for the civil aviation sector. Financial terms of the agreement are not being disclosed.

Under this agreement, EDS will provide service desk support, workplace management, hosting, storage, backup and archiving, as well as network services for major locations of SR Technics in Switzerland, United Kingdom, Ireland and Bahrain, with a total of more than 4,000 users.

As part of the agreement, EDS and SR Technics renewed an applications services agreement, which was first signed in 2001. Under this renewal, EDS will host SR Technics SAP, SAS and Maintenance and Engineering Document Systems.

“Through this agreement that builds on many years of an excellent relationship, SR Technics will achieve further operational improvements and enhance the delivery of services to our customers,” said Koni Iten, CIO of SR Technics. “This agreement is aligned to our IT roadmap and consistent with the intent of our IT outsourcing strategy to work jointly with EDS to modernize, improve and expand the IT functionalities supporting the core business of SR Technics.”

“The contract with SR Technics is an important milestone for EDS’ EMEA Transportation Hub in Zurich as we continue to grow our Transportation industry business,” said Pierre Klatt, country manager, EDS Switzerland, and vice president EDS EMEA Transportation Industry Group. “EDS is excited for the opportunity to continue our work with SR Technics to help them reach their goal of improving their core business, and I look forward to further strengthening our long-standing relationship.”

“Through this agreement, SR Technics will take advantage of our global information technology outsourcing capabilities, which will help SR Technics achieve quantifiable operational improvements and enhance the delivery of services to their customers,” said Eric Harte, vice president and leader of EDS’ Global Air Services Industry Group.

As the leading global airline IT services provider, EDS brings world-class technology solutions and infrastructure to help airlines and transportation customers sustain competitive advantage in a tightly constrained market.
About SR Technics

SR Technics is one of the world’s leading independent providers of technical services for the civil aviation sector. The SR Technics Group offers its customer airlines comprehensive and totally-tailored solutions for the technical support and management of their aircraft fleets, engines and components. With its head office at Zurich Airport, SR Technics provides its services through an extensive network of international operations and sales offices in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. About 500 airline customers currently entrust some 750 aircraft, 300 engines and 78,000 components a year to its care. The company has a workforce of around 5,300 employees, and generated total operating revenue of CHF 1.7 billion in 2006. SR Technics is owned by a consortium from the United Arab Emirates composed of Mubadala Development, Dubai Aerospace Enterprise (DAE) and Istithmar, which acquired the company in November 2006. For further information please visit www.srtechnics.com.
About EDS

EDS is a leading global technology services company delivering business solutions to its clients. EDS founded the information technology outsourcing industry 45 years ago. Today, EDS delivers a broad portfolio of information technology and business process outsourcing services to clients in the manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, communications, energy, transportation, and consumer and retail industries and to governments around the world. Learn more at eds.com.

Outsourcing Helps Companies Move Fast on Mobility

Posted by Ann All on February 20, 2008 at 12:20 pm

Back in July, I asserted that Your Next PC Just May Be a Smartphone.While that’s a little heavy on the hyperbole, there’s no question thatboth consumers and companies are showing strong interest in smartphonesand other handhelds.

About a month-and-a-half ago, IT Business Edge blogger Carl Weinschenk predicted that the smartphone will really take off in 2008, thanks to market forces like the iPhone and Google’s Android mobile development platform.

In fact, it seems that nothing can hold back the mobility market — unless it’s the bewildering arrayof devices, networks, applications and (Android notwithstanding)operating systems. While this is confusing enough for consumers, it canbe downright daunting for companies that want to outfit largeworkforces.

Some, like restaurant chain Au Bon Pain, are outsourcing their mobility projects to specialists. As detailed in an InfoWorldarticle, a startup called Enterprise Mobile is selecting the devices,handling contract negotiations with vendors, and helping Au Bon Pain’sinternal development team port applications from the desktop to themobile environment.

Says the chain’s senior vice president of IT:
There’s only so much we can do with almost unlimited demand on IT resources. Some projects you simply have to outsource.
This is very nascent technology; we believe it will be very powerful for us in the long run, but we don’t have the same level of access to carriers or Microsoft that a dedicated outsourcing partner could offer.

The CEO of Enterprise Mobile says more enterprises will turn to companies like his as strategies for mobility mature and prove to be more time- and labor-intensive than internal IT departments may have realized.

Dan Shey, an ABI Research analyst, agrees with the Enterprise Mobile exec in his recent interview with IT Business Edge.He notes that few companies are even taking advantage of such seeminglyobvious strategies as reducing their mobility costs throughshared-minutes plans.

The increasing complexity of mobile devices makes outsourcing an attractive option, says Shey, though some IT departments may resist because of their desire to “have more control over all the systems and the devices that are under their purview.” A question mark is the still-developing relationship between mobile device management platform providers and mobility service providers.

Shey says:
There are mobile device management platforms out there already but also other vendors creating mobile device management platforms that are service-specific. It will be interesting to see how all those different players position themselves as platforms to help manage mobile service within the enterprise. It will be interesting to see how the mobile device management platform providers and the mobility service providers work together in a cooperative manner to manage the services within the enterprise.

India’s Coming Boom in BPO

Although there has been some speculation about a possible slowing in demand for offshoring, fueled by news of rising salaries and shrinking labor pools in popular offshore destinations such as India, that doesn’t appear to be the case for BPO.India’s National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) and Everest Group are predicting a boom in BPO, reports InfoWorld. While India’s BPO industry should grow from $11 billion to $30 billion by 2012, it has the potential to reach $50 billion. With that kind of revenue, BPO would account for 2.5 percent of India’s gross domestic product.

Yet there’s a caveat. Nasscom and Everest Group say India’s government must take a more active role in making education and infrastructure improvements to help the BPO industry overcome possible staff shortages.

The chairman of a BPO provider called Quattro tells InfoWorld says that while his company looks for employees in small cities, “…we cannot set up operations there because the infrastructure does not exist.” Some BPO companies deal with this problem by shuttling staff between suburbs and larger cities.

The industry would like the government’s help in establishing regional hubs. It also wants the government to lift a regulation that prohibits companies from using the same facilities for domestic and international business. If the ban were lifted, service providers could perform local BPO work in the daytime and work for non-Indian customers overnight. This could help providers satisfy growing domestic demand for BPO.

Peter Allen, chief marketing officer for TPI, also was bullish on BPO’s near-term prospects in my recent interview with him. According to TPI, 2007’s fourth quarter saw the highest total contract value in two years for BPO, and the highest annualized contract value since the second quarter of 2004.

Allen cited companies’ desire to monetize their offshore captives, in many cases by selling their BPO services. He says:

The whole proposition (of captives) is built upon scale and the leverage of scale. So you have to come to grips with the fact that to get scale, you will have to serve others. You leverage facilities and people and applications. You leverage as much as you can.

He also noted growth in industry-specific BPO, which he sees as a more sophisticated model. He says:

So instead of looking at accounting and HR and payroll, you take a more vertical look at things — claims processing for insurance or mortgage processing or call center operations that do sales order management. This says that you are bundling your technology and your operations. It’s a much more strategic direction for companies to engage a third party to provide those sorts of services.