Tag: outsourcery

BT slashes 1,300 jobs as outsourcers suffer

Kitten-KongBT announced it would be slashing 13,000 jobs to save £1.5 billion over the next three years, mostly due to the poor performance of its outsourcing arm.

The restructuring comes after BT’s full-year results revealed its revenue declined one percent year on year during the 12 months ending 31 March 2018 – to £23.7 billion while operating profit was up seven per cent to £3.4 billion.

BT’s results were hampered by its troubled Global Services business which saw revenue decline nine percent to just over £5 billion, with EBITDA dropping 12 percent to £495 million.

BT said that of the 13,000 job cuts around one third would come overseas in the Global Services division.

BT is also to abandon its London HQ in favour of 30 “modern strategic sites”.

BT CEO Gavin Patterson said: “Decisions like this are not easy. We recognise that it is going to affect a lot of people, but ultimately we need to do these things to ensure that we remain a competitive business going forward and that we can benchmark our performance against peer companies.”

BT said that the majority of the redundancies would come from back-end roles and mid-management, adding that simplifying its structure will result in “fewer, bigger, more accountable leadership roles”.

It will, however, recruit around 6,000 new employees to “support network deployment and customer service”.

In Global Services, BT plans to introduce new digital products and focus more on its top global customers, while “significantly lowering costs”.

BT said: “The next phase of BT’s transformation coincides with changes in the telecoms market with exponential growth in data consumption and network capacity requirements and increasing competitive intensity from established companies and new entrants.

“It is critical that BT transforms its operating model to build a lean and agile organisation that delivers sustained improvement in customer experience and productivity.”

It is not the only big outsourcer which has been suffering lately. Capita announced losses of £513 million and other firms are finding it hard to compete against smaller rivals.

Outsourcery was a tale told by an idiot

SormickA report into the crash of Cloud infrastructure and apps provider Outsourcery shows that the outfit died because it just ran out of cash.

The Statement of Affairs filed at Companies House said that sales were  below expectations, leading to funding shortfalls.  After its IPO it burnt through £17.7m of cash and £4m of secured debt from Vodafone.

In 2013, Outsourcery reported a net loss of £9.12 million. In 2014 its net losses were £7.6 million and in 2015 £6.22 million. So while it seemed to be getting better it was still losing money hand over fist.

Co-CEOs at Outsourcery, Piers Linney and Simon Newton, managed to attract interest from 12 bidders before it was sold to GCI Telecom for £4m.  This included £3.73 million for goodwill and nearly £270,000 for equipment. About 100 staff transferred to the new owners.

Outsourcery Plc, Outsourcery Group Ltd, Outsourcery Holding and Outsourcery Holdings were placed into administration. Outsourcery US and Outsourcery Mobile were not but these were largely dormant and the only assets were intra-company receivables.

Post sale, Vodafone was paid £1.8 million and then another £1.5 million toward its £5 million secured debt and £300,000 in accrued interest; Etive was owed £1 million plus £8,000 in interest.

Creditors’ claims are anticipated to be in the region of £1.9 million including £424,637 owed to Hewlett Packard International Bank, £165,244 to Fasthosts, £134,273 to Telecity and £112,937 to Bytes Software Services.

It was all a complete disaster and a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks that the word “cloud” is a license to print money.

Trust me. I’m a cloud

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeCompanies worried about the dangers of cloud computing can set their minds at ease, if a recent survey from Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) is to be credited.

Based on questions asked of 250 senior IT business decision makers, it shows 69 percent of firms already use cloud based services.

But it’s all a bit of a mix because 86 percent of the respondents said they had a hybrid mix including cloud, servers on their premises and hosted services.

Piers Linney, CEO of Outsourcery reckons that a gradual move to the cloud happens because companies don’t want to replace their entire systems or only use cloud for some aspects of their businesses.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Outsourcery offers cloud services and no doubt Outsourcery is happy to learn that the survey shows 91 percent of those surveyed are happy with providers.

Ingram Micro and Outsourcery team up for VAR cloud service

IMIngram Micro and cloud provider Outsourcery have conjured up a new cloud service designed specifically for Ingram Micro’s partners and customers.

Under the arrangement, Ingram Micro partners will sell Outsourcery’s hosted version of Microsoft Lync, with enterprise-grade services and unified functionality delivered from the cloud. Cloud computing is a relatively hot trend at the moment, but surveys reveal that almost a quarter of IT organisations are concerned about the lack of staff skills necessary to support cloud solutions. The partnership is supposed to address these concerns.

Apay Obang-Oyway, General Manager, Enterprise Software and Services at Ingram Micro commented: “We have created the Advanced Solutions Division to offer our channel partners a comprehensive approach for identifying and pursuing opportunities within advanced technology categories.

Obang-Oyway said the goal is to help partners grow and diversify while facilitating development in the channel.

“The successful model Outsourcery have already established complements these objectives so taking hosted cloud solutions to market together was the natural next step,” he concluded.