BPOUkraine » 2008

TATA ACQUIRES CITIGROUP’S INDIA BPO OPERATIONS

October 9, 2008 on 6:28 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off

Mumbai, New York: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) (BSE: TCS.BO, NSE: TCS.NS), a leading IT services, business solutions and outsourcing firm, and Citigroup Inc (Citi), a leading global financial services company, today announced that they have reached an agreement for TCS to acquire all of Citi’s interest in Citigroup Global Services Limited (CGSL), the India-based captive business processing outsourcing (BPO) arm of Citi for an all-cash consideration of approximately $505 million, subject to closing adjustments. In addition to the sale, Citi has signed an agreement for TCS to provide, through CGSL, process outsourcing services to Citi and its affiliates in an aggregate amount of US$2.5 billion over a period of 9.5 years. The agreement builds upon the existing relationship between Citi and TCS whereby TCS provides application development, infrastructure support, help desk and other process outsourcing services to Citi.

The acquisition broadens TCS’s portfolio of end-to-end IT and BPO services in the global banking and financial services (BFS) sector. TCS’s enhanced scale and expertise will provide service improvements to Citi and Citi’s customers.

CGSL is one of the largest providers of business processing outsourcing services within the banking and financial services sector, providing end-to-end process management across the BFS spectrum and a broad array of services to Citi’s consumer, corporate and global wealth management businesses world wide. CGSL has more than 12,000 employees located in India and expects to generate revenues of approximately $278 million in 2008.

S Ramadorai, CEO and MD, TCS said: “This is a landmark acquisition for TCS, helping us to not only acquire new capabilities in the banking domain but also underscoring the importance of our long-term, sustainable relationships with our large customers, including Citi.” He added: “This transaction will complement our domain expertise and bring new capabilities to TCS that will help drive growth going forward.”

Don Callahan, chief administrative officer, Citi said: “This is a great transaction that benefits all parties – Citi, our customers, our employees and TCS. Our customers require access to increasingly complex processing solutions and this relationship will achieve a ‘best-in-class’ technology model that capitalises on both CGSL’s expertise in financial services and TCS’s expertise in process optimisation. TCS will offer CGSL stronger growth potential and superior continued services to Citi clients around the world. This transaction is expected to help reduce operating expenses related to business processing and will allow us to focus on our core financial services competencies.”

N Chandrasekaran, COO and executive director, TCS, added: “The acquisition of CGSL has two immediate strategic benefits for TCS. It gives us the ability to offer a comprehensive end-to-end, domain-led solution for business operations of large financial services institutions. It also positions us well to create banking processing platforms by integrating our products and process capabilities.” He added: “We welcome CGSL professionals into the TCS family, where they will be able to participate in the company’s new growth endeavours.”

TCS has provided IT services to Citi since 1992 and is currently one of the largest IT services partners for Citi, delivering IT and business processing outsourcing services to Citi across its operations in North America, Europe, India, Japan, Singapore and the rest of Asia Pacific.

The parties expect to close the transaction in the fourth quarter of 2008. Merrill Lynch acted as advisors to TCS in this transaction.

Spammers are obliged to pay $236m

October 9, 2008 on 2:45 am | In Uncategorized | No Comments

How much is spam worth? In the case of a couple who sent millions of spams to a small ISP, $236 million. That’s the judgment a federal judge in Iowa levied against the husband-and-wife spamming team of Henry Perez and Suzanne Bartok, IDG reports.
Over four months in 2003, the couple used a program appropriately called Bulk Mailing 4 Dummies (a name that not only nicely describes its user base but simultaneously violates IDG Books’ trademark on the “For Dummies” books) to send millions of emails to little CIS Internet Services of Clinton, Iowa. CIS underwent an expensive server upgrade and devoted three servers to blocking the scumbags’ spam assault.
CIS owner Robert Kramer III said the company was processing about 500 million spam messages every day in 2003.

“There were millions of e-mails being delivered to us for each spam campaign to users that didn’t exist on our servers,” Kramer said in an interview. “It was do or die: it wasn’t just a nuisance for us.”

Perez and Bartok claimed the emails they sent were legit. That argument was just a lie, the court said.

“The court simply does not believe Mr. Perez or Ms. Bartok,” Judge John Jarvey wrote in a Sept. 30 order.

CIS has sued and won judgments against 10 spammer so far, but good luck collecting on those, or from Perez and Bartok. Many spammers simply fold their companies or move the money overseas.

No word on this couple’s assets but one suspects it is less than $236 million. The size of the judgment – based on $10 per spam – may be more of a deterrent than one that compensates CIS for its losses.

Can SOA Help Bring IT, Business Together on BPM?

October 8, 2008 on 9:43 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off

Posted by Ann All on October 3, 2008 at 1:40 pm

I recently wrote about a survey that shows that more than half of companies do not designate a specific group to lead business process management (BPM) initiatives, instead spreading the responsibility among IT, finance and operations, and other business areas.

In that post, I wondered whether the longstanding debate over whether the business or IT is best positioned to lead process improvement efforts contributes to the apparent difficulty in tapping a BPM leader. What I didn’t say, but should have, is that the lack of a clear-cut BPM leader can also create conflict between the business and IT.

In a November interview, onStrategies principal Tony Baer told IT Business Edge’s Lora Bentley that while most folks agree that the business should be responsible for process definition, it gets more contentious when activity shifts from definition and modeling to implementation. He said:

For IT and the business, BPM is just another venue for playing “he said, she said.” The business has always believed that IT does not understand the semantics of business processes, while IT believes that the business has no conception on what it takes for automated business processes to execute successfully.

A service-oriented architecture may help bring the two sides closer together, said Baer, because it “facilitates abstracting the process from the underlying application silos that contain the piecemeal business logic.” Since services are self-contained in a SOA, developers or process designers can dynamically build composite services that implement business processes, which lends a welcome layer of agility to BPM. He said:

Obviously, you don’t need SOA to implement BPM, as BPM, the discipline and technology, predated today’s SOA-based technology products. But the architecture of SOA makes it an excellent deployment approach to BPM.

SOA makes it not only faster, but cheaper, to automate or otherwise modify processes, contends Dan Woods, CTO of Evolved Media. Writing in Forbes, Woods notes that it won’t do much good to redesign processes if costly IT infrastructure changes are required to implement them. He also offers several tips on BPM and SOA. Among them:

Both manual and automated processes should be described. “Too often,” writes Woods, “BPM programs become about drawing lines with fancy visual tools that are focused only on automation.”
Focus on modeling and optimizing the processes most likely to yield transformative results. While a generic box is OK for models of processes like “payroll system,” you’ll want to see lots of lines, boxes and more specific details for more strategic processes.
Don’t try to use SOA everywhere, just in areas where added flexibility will provide the biggest business benefit. Writes Woods: “If your long-term plan is to service-enable all of your applications, you may be delusional. This is way too much work.”
Appoint a business process expert to facilitate communication between the business and IT. (Woods calls this role a BPX, which makes me crazy, but that’s OK.) He writes: “BPXers advocate for the business process perspective — keep BPM in charge and then use their sophisticated empathy for both business processes and technology to keep the flow of communication going between business and IT.”

The cost of doing business in China: Privacy

October 5, 2008 on 2:28 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments Off

Posted by Larry Dignan @ 6:16 am

There’s a good amount of scuttlebutt today on a report that highlights how the Chinese government is monitoring Skype traffic for keywords that may offend the Communist party.

The report in question (Techmeme), Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s Tom-Skype platform, details the activities of the Chinese government’s monitoring of Tom-Skype users. Tom Online and Skype have teamed up to offer a Chinese version of the messaging software in China.

The gist:

The full text chat messages of TOM-Skype users, along with Skype users who have communicated with TOM-Skype users, are regularly scanned for sensitive keywords, and if present, the resulting data are uploaded and stored on servers in China.

Here’s a look at the keywords China monitors:

Meanwhile, personal information is stored on insecure systems and surveillance is based on keywords, but not entirely (user names may also be in play).

Koman: Chinese monitoring Tom-Skype messages

And eBay spokeswoman told the New York Times to talk to Tom Online about the security issues. There was no comment on the monitoring.

Yawn. Does this report surprise anyone? Here’s a headline that would be real news: China respects online privacy.

Sure, the monitoring stinks. But let’s get real here. China was monitoring taxi cab rides during the Olympics. So what’s the big deal if China checks Skype messages? Or your Web viewing habits? Or your personal data? Or anything else for that matter? China monitors your stuff. China doesn’t know the concept of privacy and it isn’t likely to care unless its people stand up and revolt–and they aren’t. If the biggest spotlight on the planet–the Olympics–isn’t going to put China on the good Internet behavior bandwagon it’s highly unlikely that a report by a group called Citizen Lab will.

And if you’re a U.S. vendor operating in China you try and straddle this line between our values and China’s. It doesn’t always work, but companies try to walk it anyway. Shareholders propose numerous human rights policies at their annual meetings with companies. Good luck with that folks.

In the end, it’s hardly shocking that China is reading Skype messages. It reads all of messages in the country. Privacy is the cost of doing business there. In an ideal world, that cost would be too high. But apparently the rewards eclipse the costs for now.

Adivent to Provide Sales Outsourcing Services for Aethra in Central European Telecom Market

October 2, 2008 on 3:33 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off

A new partnership between the leading companies Adivent and Aethra to focus on increasing sales of Networking Division line of products

Last update: 11:38 a.m. EDT Sept. 30, 2008

BERN, Switzerland and ANCONA, Italy, Sept 30, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Adivent ( http://www.adivent.eu), a European sales outsourcing company focused on the telecom market, today announced that Aethra ( http://www.aethra.com), a leading player in the global telecommunications marketplace, has contracted with Adivent for sales program development and execution targeted to telecom operators in Central Europe. The new partnership may extend into other areas such as Northern Europe in the future. Adivent offers a new alternative that streamlines the sales and operations process and allows telecom suppliers to quickly establish a sales presence in Europe at a fraction of the time and cost it typically takes using traditional methods.

“Aethra is a great example of a highly diversified hardware company that needed a focused and targeted sales campaign for a very specific line of business, and instead of investing in the hard costs of building out a program, turned to Adivent and its established network of telecom sales professionals,” said Gianni Burzi, managing partner at Adivent. “We look forward to working together with Aethra and helping the company grow its market share in Central European.”

Adivent will focus on helping increase sales of Aethra’s industry leading network products, including its carrier-grade gateway, ISDN and xDSL systems. Its SalesTargetSource(TM) sales offering provides a complete turnkey service to quickly ramp-up a sales team that has an extensive network of telecom relationships, certified sales skills and a proven track record of success. The services are backed by a Service Level Agreement that guarantees fees are only charged after pre-determined results have been delivered. In addition, Adivent offers complete transparency into sales campaign progress and direct access to and directional input with its new sales force.

“When we decided to focus more sales resources toward our network systems within Central Europe, the challenge was to find the most effective solution to optimize penetration, and valorize our range of networking products in these markets,” said Marco Viezzoli, CEO of Aethra. “With Adivent, we can quickly begin the selling process at a fraction of the cost and leverage the experience and professionalism of its established network of sales associates.”

About Aethra(R)

Aethra ( http://www.aethra.com), a leader in the global telecommunications market, develops, manufactures and markets a wide range of high-performance products, including networking test equipment and products for ISDN and xDSL networks, video communication solutions, audio conference systems, as well as multi conference audio-video-data service management. Aethra is currently present in 65 countries with its own network of partners and sister companies, and international offices in Miami Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Madrid, Paris, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing and New Delhi. Founded in 1972, Aethra received the international award “Videoconferencing Company of the Year 2006″ in its 35th year in the telecommunications industry, and is the recognized partner of over 40 telecommunications carriers worldwide. Aethra’s exceptional products have distinguished the company as a leader in the telecommunications industry worldwide, reflecting its expertise in bringing cutting-edge communications technologies to the market.

About Adivent

Adivent offers a highly defined set of sales outsourcing services designed to help telecom vendors increase sales among the leading service providers in Europe. Based on its extensive network of contacts, certified sales skills and proven track record, Adivent assumes much of the risk small- to mid-sized software and hardware suppliers’ face when establishing a Europe-based sales organization or channel strategy. From targeted sales research and coaching to channel partner and sales force deployment, Adivent helps customers develop sales strategies and operational sales forces that are focused, results-driven and leverage years of experience selling into the largest telecom providers in Europe. For more information visit: http://www.adivent.eu.
SOURCE Adivent

http://www.adivent.eu

TATA ACQUIRES CITIGROUP’S INDIA BPO OPERATIONS

Spammers are obliged to pay $236m

Can SOA Help Bring IT, Business Together on BPM?

The cost of doing business in China: Privacy

Adivent to Provide Sales Outsourcing Services for Aethra in Central European Telecom Market

CEO Twitter

Why BPO in Ukraine?