• The Australian BPO market is expected to grow by 20 % over the next year or two.
  Get your copy of the Australian BPO research study now.
  Go to – http://thesauce.net.au/sauce-research
• The Australian Business Process Outsourcing Association (ABPOA) is hosting a Cocktail Reception in honour of a trade delegation from the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPA/P) and the Australian-based Philippine Trade and Investment Commission.

  We would like to invite ABPOA members and guests to attend, meet, and network with our friends from the Philippines. 



  Where: Level 15, NSW Business Chamber, 140 Arthur Street, North Sydney NSW 2060
  When: Monday 21st May from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm

  Tickets: To secure your place at this popular event, please register at
  Go To – http://abpoabpap2012.eventbrite.com

• Vocal Authenticity and Insightful Learning
  Transform your business through Vocal Authenticity and Insightful Listening

Use your voice to create more meaningful and trusting connections with others over the phone and face to face!

  Business Enterprise Centre

19/323 Castlereagh Street
Haymarket NSW
  Thursday 31 May 2012
  6:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Beverage and canapés provided
  Contact: admin@ccma.asn.au

• New Generation of UTM Firewalls Deliver Proven Enterprise-Grade Security to Small and Distributed Organisations. Dell SonicWALL TZ Series Provides Market-leading Security Combined with High Performance, Ease of Deployment and Broad Mobile Platform Support.

  The TZ 105 and TZ 205 provide an array of security features that deliver enterprise-grade network protection powered by Dell SonicWALL’s patented Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection®. The only firewall in its class to truly enable mobile workforce with native SSL VPN remote access client for Apple iOS®, Google® Android™, Windows, Mac OS and Linux devices Delivers wire-speed Deep Packet Inspection performance and protection for today’s broadband connections.

Freelancer.com, the world’s largest outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace, today announced its 50 fastest growing online job categories for the first quarter of 2012 with the release of the Freelancer Fast 50.

Chief Executive, Matt Barrie, said the Freelancer.com Fast 50 pulls data from over 3.3 million users and 1.5 million projects creating the most comprehensive insight into online job trends. “We have seen a huge increase in outsourcing on the whole, with businesses rethinking their strategies moving into the New Year,” Barrie said.

TOP TRENDS FOR Q1 2012:

• Outsourcing surges with a rise in business process outsourcing: Outsourcing of back office and non-core functionality has seen a dramatic rise in the last quarter with Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) showing the highest growth of any job category in Q1 of 2012.
• Huge increase in VA jobs as businesses focus on core activities: Virtual Assistant jobs (up by 144% to 3205 jobs) have seen a surge in this quarter. SMEs, who traditionally do office administration in-house, are outsourcing these tasks as a result of the comparatively low cost of offshore labour.
• Mobile app development grows as smart phones show no sign of slowing: Android (up by 26% to 2,863 jobs), iPhone (up by 27% to 4,318 jobs) and iPad (up by 19% to 1,828 jobs), with “post-PC device” sales outstripping that of PCs and a slew of new models hitting the market, the number of jobs in these areas has seen a steady increase.
• Open Standards will own the Web: HTML5 (up 48% to 2,160 jobs) continues its ascent as the de-facto Web 2.0 standard. The continued growth of “post-PC” devices and their support of next generation open web standards.
• Losers: SEO (up by 8% to 10,152 jobs) has remained comparatively stagnant. Despite a stronger recovery for SEO in late 2011, Google’s constant fight against low quality link building has had a major impact on the SEO industry.

Source: Business Review Australia

By Shelia McGee-Smith

A hosted solution leverages conversational virtual agents powered by artificial intelligence to automate a variety of inbound and outbound call types.

VPI announced today what they describe in the press release as “game-changing” virtual call agent technology. VirtualSource is a pay-as-you-go, hosted solution that leverages conversational virtual agents powered by artificial intelligence to automate a variety of inbound and outbound call types. VPI’s website lists about 30 different interaction types that are already available, from taking orders to processing returns and customer surveys. I was intrigued enough listening to the demo calls to request a briefing.

I doff my hat to VPI’s VP-Marketing Patrick Botz. In the course of a 30 minute call, he attached this announcement to just about every hot button in the contact center and customer experience space today…and then some.

Cloud: VPI has launched VirtualSource as a hosted solution. Similar to other cloud-based solutions, this shortens deployment time and provides companies with an OPEX versus CAPEX solution. Companies can deploy VirtualSource in a hybrid model, allowing the existing premises-based IVR to handle some interactions while specifying those that are sent to VirtualSource.

Virtual: Admittedly, this is not the trendy “virtual” of data center deployment of servers or desktops. Virtual here refers to an automated agent persona, part of the reason for the comparison in the title to Siri and Watson. Asked how VirtualSource is different from virtual agent solutions that have been around for years and not really succeeded, Botz highlights the embedded artificial intelligence that is layered on top of the Nuance-based speech technology. Instead of using decision trees, which must have rules and branching created for every possible response, VirtualSource learns on its own.

Mobile: Mobile is hot, with companies spinning like tops trying to better meet the needs of their mobile customers. Just like Siri can simplify the execution of simple tasks for a consumer with a smart phone, Botz contends that VirtualSource can simplify the completion of routine tasks for businesses. Without requiring a special app be downloaded from an app store, companies can improve service to customers on mobile devices.

Minimal Professional Services: One of the problems with sophisticated solutions is the time and expense of the professional services that must be applied to get an acceptable result. Think CTI and its lack of market traction in the 1990s. When I asked about professional services costs, I was completely taken aback by the response. Initially, there are no professional services charges. Customers pay 25 cents per minute and sign a one year contract with a monthly minimum. Because VirtualSource learns as it goes instead of requiring that rules be written, Botz says that with as few as 10-20 sample calls and the scripts used to train agents, an application can be up and running.

Ms. McGee-Smith has spent thirty years in the communications industry, including 12 years with The PELORUS Group. Earlier in her career, Ms. McGee-Smith held sales management, market research and product management positions at AT&T, Timeplex and Dun & Bradstreet. Her views on the market can also be found on Twitter @mcgeesmith.

Source: No Jitter

By Natasha Singer

Vlad Sejnoha is talking to the TV again.

OK, maybe you’ve done that, too. But here’s the weird thing: His TV is listening.

“Dragon TV,” Sejnoha says to the screen, “find movies with Meryl Streep.”

Up pops a list of films like Out of Africa and It’s Complicated.

“Dragon TV, change to CNN,” he says.

Presto – the channel flips to CNN.

Sejnoha is sitting in what looks like a living room but is, in fact, a sort of laboratory inside Nuance Communications, the leading force in voice technology and the speech-recognition engine behind Siri, the virtual personal assistant on the Apple iPhone 4S.

Here, Sejnoha, the company’s chief technology officer, and other executives are plotting a voice-enabled future where human speech brings responses from not only smartphones and televisions, cars and computers, but also coffee makers, refrigerators, thermostats, alarm systems and other smart devices and appliances.
It is a wildly disruptive idea. But such systems are already beginning to change the way we interact with the world and, for better and worse, how we think about technology. Until now, after all, we’ve talked only to one another. What if we begin talking to all sorts of machines, too – and, like Siri, those machines respond as if they were human?

Granted, people have been talking into machines and at machines since the days of Edison’s phonograph. By the 1980s, commercial speech recognition systems had become sophisticated enough to transcribe spoken words into text. Today, voice technology is a fixture of many companies’ customer-service operations, albeit an occasionally maddening one.

But now the race is on to make the voice the sought-after new interface between our technology and us. The results could rival innovations like the computer mouse and the graphic icon and, some experts say, eventually pose challenges for giants like Google by bypassing their traditional search engines.

No player is bigger in voice technology than Nuance, of Burlington, Massachusetts, an industry pioneer that has acquired more than 40 companies in the field and today employs 7300 people. It is one of the companies that helped make a big technological leap from programs that take dictation to systems that actually extract meaning from words and respond to them. Now it wants to push far beyond that.

“They are the equivalent of Microsoft, Google or Amazon in a very niche technological space,” says Andrew Rosenberg, an assistant professor of computer science at Queens College at the City University of New York.

Like many new technologies, sophisticated voice systems have potential drawbacks. Some experts worry about privacy invasions, others about our ever-deepening attachment to devices like smartphones.

Humans are wired for speech and tend to respond to talking devices as if they were kindred spirits, says Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“I’m not saying voice recognition is bad,” Turkle says. “I’m saying it’s part of a package of attachments to objects where we should tread carefully because we are pushing a lot of Darwinian buttons in our psychology.”

Only a decade ago, voice-enabled virtual assistants seemed more science fiction than business fact. But in 2000, Paul Ricci, a former executive at Xerox, concluded that voice software could one day disrupt the marketplace the way the mouse and the icon had in the 1980s.

“We had to decide early on where there were markets where we could successfully deploy the technology,” says Ricci, Nuance’s chief executive.

Nuance, then known as ScanSoft, went on an aggressive acquisition spree. It bought a desktop dictation system called Dragon NaturallySpeaking, as well as dozens of small companies that had carved niches in medical dictation, automated voice-response systems and speech research.

Its most significant acquisition was Nuance, a rival that had been spun off from SRI International of Menlo Park, California. The combined company took the Nuance name. (SRI International later developed and spun off Siri, which was acquired by Apple in 2010.)

“They have literally tried to buy every good asset out there, or build it themselves, knit it all together and augment it,” Richard Davis, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity, says of Nuance.

Nuance reported revenue of about $US1.3 billion for 2011, with $US515 million of that coming from its health care technology business.

Not everyone is as enamored with voice technology. Some privacy advocates worry that it adds an audio track to the digital trail that people leave behind when they use the Web or apps, potentially exposing them to more data mining.

Voice recognition software works by sending speech to processors that break down spoken words into sound waves and use algorithms to identify the most likely words formed by the sounds. The system typically records and stores speech so it can teach itself to become more accurate over time. Nuance, for example, believes that, aside from the federal government, it has amassed the largest archive of recorded speech in the United States.

Nuance says it is impossible to identify consumers from the recordings, because the company’s system recognises people’s voices only by unique codes on their devices, rather than by their names. The company’s privacy policy says it uses the voice data of consumers only to improve its own internal systems.

“We have no idea who you are today,” says Peter Mahoney, the company’s chief marketing officer.
Such assurances aside, voice recognition software could conceivably pose enough of a risk to people’s privacy that regulators are watching.

“Just as we are concerned about the possible applications of facial recognition, there are other forms of biometric identification, like voice, that pose the same kind of problems,” says David C. Vladeck, the director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the US Federal Trade Commission. He was speaking about voice technology in general, not about Nuance in particular.

Dragon Go,” Sejnoha says into his iPhone, “I want to make reservations for three tomorrow night at Craigie on Main.”

Dragon Go, Nuance’s answer to Siri, is a virtual assistant app that has been downloaded several million times since its introduction last summer.

Unlike Siri, however, Dragon Go doesn’t talk back. Sejnoha was asking for a reservation at a restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the app went directly to OpenTable and displayed his reservation options.
Ask Dragon Go for tickets to, say, The Hunger Games, and it typically displays a listing of show times at the nearest cinema. A query about a particular spa might elicit reviews from Yelp.

Dragon Go, Nuance’s first direct-to-consumer app, is part of a push to build the brand’s executives say, is faster answers in fewer steps. In many cases, Nuance collects a small fee from partner sites when people make restaurant reservations or complete purchases.

The app could be construed as a challenge to the likes of Google and Microsoft, which have their own voice products – such as Google Voice Actions and Microsoft Tellme – as well as search engines.

“If you are Google,” says Davis, the analyst, “you are saying, ‘Holy smokes, we are about to get cut out of the equation.”‘

Christopher Katsaros, a Google spokesman, declined to comment. The company has recently updated Google Voice Actions, its voice-command system for Android phones, with a feature that continuously converts people’s speech to text, making it faster and smoother to dictate and send text messages, search Google aloud, or ask for directions.

Lezli Goheen, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, said that the company had addressed consumers’ expectations for easier access to information through several means. In addition to Tellme, a program included in all new Windows products that lets people dictate text messages and commands to applications like calendars, she said, the company has introduced Bing Voice Search, a program that lets people speak their Bing searches.
Nuance, meanwhile, has similarly ambitious plans for its health care business. In collaboration with IBM, the company is developing analytics to scour the medical notes that doctors dictate after they see patients. The idea is to search the text for common red flags – like medicines that interact dangerously – and automatically alert doctors, hopefully reducing problems and health care costs.

But the lack of disclosure bothers Turkle of MIT. As voice-enabled systems become more sophisticated, she says, they create the illusion that we are interacting with other people, rather than with machines. In the long term, she says, the systems’ sleekness and ease of use could end up diminishing the value of slower, messier, real human connections. Reminding users that they are talking to a machine can make them more conscious of the superficiality of the exchange.

“We need to make a cultural decision,” Turkle says. “Either we want to alert people when they are talking to a machine, or we don’t.”

In 2008, Nuance sued a fierce rival in the voice technology market, contending patent infringement. The company, Vlingo, which markets its own virtual-assistant apps for Android phones, BlackBerrys and iPhones, countersued, making similar allegations.

Last year, a court found that Vlingo had not infringed. On several other lawsuits, including the Vlingo countersuit, the parties have agreed to stays. That is because, last December, Nuance agreed to buy Vlingo for an undisclosed sum. It plans to complete the acquisition in the first half of this year.

“From our standpoint, the ability to compete with Google, that owns half the smartphone market, and Microsoft, that bundles voice with their products, that’s the real business logic behind merging with Nuance,” says Dave Grannan, the chief executive of Vlingo, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Nuance and Vlingo share a vision of a world populated by cloud-based, voice-enabled virtual assistants that move seamlessly from one device to another.

One afternoon earlier this year, a team of Vlingo executives demonstrated their own TV voice-command system to a New York Times reporter. The executives also showed a short animated video in which a fictional couple merrily conversed with their smartphones, tablet computer, TV and car – and the devices replied in kind, alerting the male character that his car needed gas and the woman that her flight that day had been canceled because of bad weather.

“More proactively alerting you with voice, telling you something about your car or an accident ahead, a personal assistant thinking about your needs and keeping you connected to other people is where we think this technology is really going,” Grannan says.

Back in Nuance’s mock living room, Sejnoha is finishing his demo of Dragon TV, the company’s new software that can be built into web-connected TVs. With it, viewers can use voice commands not only to find programs but also to make Skype calls or shop on Amazon via the TV. The technology is scheduled to hit the market shortly: LG Electronics plans to introduce a smart TV powered by Nuance software that lets viewers update Facebook and Twitter accounts by speaking into a special remote control.

Soon, Sejnoha predicts, many other devices, not just televisions, will be taking voiced commands, and talking back. In Germany, people can already ask a Nuance-powered coffee maker – marketed as “the first fully automatic machine that obeys” speech – to make cappuccino. The machine, called the Jura Impressa Z7 One Touch Voice, speaks both English and German.

Dragon TV, meanwhile, is already available in about two dozen languages.

“Dragon TV, mute,” Sejnoha says.

Silence.

“See,” he says, “it’s useful.”

The New York Times
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/hometech/the-human-voice-as-a-game-changer-20120401-1w6ej.html#ixzz1qpOfbSvt

The best countries to do business http://idealog.co.nz/blog/2012/03/infographic-best-countries-doing-business

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Kraków (Poland) tops world industry ranking for shared services, technology and outsourcing. Kraków has again topped the list of emerging global outsourcing locations in the 2012 Tholons “Top 100 Outsourcing Destinations.” The city has maintained its number 1 status from the last ranking in 2010, having steadily improved its position from 4th place in 2009 and 5th place in 2008. As the top placed emerging city, Kraków’s is banging on the door of the top 10 established cities, which is again headed by Bangalore. There are no new entrants in the top 10. Mumbai, Delhi, Manila and Chennai join Bangalore to make up the top 5 as in 2010. Dublin (which slips from 7th to 8th place) and Shanghai (in 10th place) are the only cities in the top 10 outside India and the Philippines.

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China’s software and IT outsourcing industry is booming, rising by a third in 2011 to reach a whopping 1.84 trillion Yuan, (A$275 Billion) according to new government figures released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The stats, seen by state-run news agency Xinhua, represent around a 4% increase on the average for the growth rate from 2006 to 2010. These figures suggest China is rapidly closing the gap with India’s outsourcing sector. According to NASSCOM, India’s IT outsourcing trade body, the sector is expected to grow by 15% this year to reach $100 billion.

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Philippine-based business process outsourcing firm SPi Global is urging the government to re-introduce Spanish language courses in schools to give the Philippines a competitive edge in voice-based BPO. Latin American countries are becoming more popular with countries like the US, one of the Philippines’ major customers for BPO, which requires bilingual support.

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Jabra is the brand of GN Netcom, a subsidiary of GN Store Nord has announced its membership of the Microsoft LyncTM Hosted Pack Reference Architecture Partner Ecosystem to Provide Cloud Based Communications.

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Multitenant Pack for Partner Hosting is a UC hosting solution for telecom and hosting providers. It delivers a foundation for service providers to add an economical UC service to their existing portfolio, and at the same time allowing them to configure their service and build upon it in their own unique ways to add value to and differentiate their solutions.

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Congratulations to Cliff Rosenberg, Managing Director, LinkedIn Australia, New Zealand & South East Asia and his team, for achieving a tremendous milestone today. They exceeded 3 million members from Australia on the LinkedIn network!

LinkedIn connects over 150 million members worldwide to find jobs, gain and share insights, grow a business and much more. To join LinkedIn, visit www.linkedin.com

To join The Sauce LinkedIn group, visit http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=3239261&trk=anet_ug_grppro

Westpac has flagged plans to cut a further 119 IT jobs from local operations in the latest round of outsourcing to the bank’s technology partners.

Staff at the company’s offices in NSW, Queensland, South Australia and Victoria were told of the cuts last week.

The cuts would generally impact systems maintenance roles and would be outsourced to vendors specified under the bank’s 20-month Applications Services Transformation program, first unveiled in November.
It is understood IBM is one outsource partner for the bank but a Westpac spokesman would not confirm which partners the jobs would be outsourced to.

“We want to retain our core high-skilled technology workforce in Australia but some IT roles can be more efficiently provided by external specialists,” the spokesman said.

The job cuts comes as the latest round of IT transformation at the company, which included the introduction of a new multi-sourcing initiative and significant changes to IT executive roles at the bank.

Outsourcing costs accounted for $592 million in expenses during the 2011 financial year for Westpac.

Source: IT News

The Fifth Sino-Japan Software and Service Outsourcing Conference of 2012 was held in Chengdu on Feb 21. The Chengdu Association of Sourcing Services invited over 180 Chinese and Japanese delegates from governments, companies, institutions and industrial organizations.

Topics for discussion included the Business Process Outsourcing, embedded IC design, SAAS product applications, logistics information and outsourcing talent training.

The guests exchanged ideas on software outsourcing in cloud times and also industrial migration and cooperation after an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan on March 11, 2011.

Japanese guests also visited the Chengdu Municipal Government and local enterprises including Tianfu Software Park, Dujiangyan Outsourcing Industrial Park and Chengdu Winnersoft, Co. Ltd.

Chengdu attaches great importance to the software and outsourcing industry, which have become major indicators of an annual average growth rate that has reached over 30 percent in the region. Chengdu is a competitive and attractive area for software industries such as Fortune 500 companies, well-known domestic software companies and numerous local enterprises.

Three of the top 10 service outsourcing enterprises in the world – Accenture, IBM and Wipro, and 19 Fortune 100 companies – have operations in Chengdu. Six of the top ten domestic service outsourcing enterprises have set up branch offices and over forty multinational companies have established global delivery centers, shared services centers and research and development centers locally.

Industrial departments and associations in Chengdu have established strategic relationships with the Okinawa Prefectural Government, Japan External Trade Organization and Japan-China Economic Association. Several local enterprises have established long-term business relations with Fujitsu, NTTDATA, Nomura Securities and Toyota. A new business model has taken shape amidst the rapid rise of its outsourcing trade with Japan.

By Mark Atterby – Senior Staff Writer

The use of computer-based collaboration tools is helping to expand the scope of BPO and the range of processes that can be outsourced. With the exponential growth in the use of these tools, there are predictions that over the next few years remote working and web conferencing systems will change the landscape of traditional working environments.

According to Anne Rouse in her book, Managing E-Collaboration Risks in Business Process Outsourcing (2009, Deakin University), a major development in recent years has been the growth of “virtual organisations” (or “extended enterprises”), where a network of service supplier and vendor firms cooperates to create customer value. The value these networks created by vendors and purchasers hold the promise of substantial business benefits associated with specialisation and scale. These include reduced costs, greater business flexibility, and higher service quality.

A business process involves a number of interrelated activities performed with the aim of generating value. As outsourcing and BPO is shifting towards building relationships aimed at adding strategic value to those relationships, client and BPO vendor organisation need to work closer together to identify mutual benefits and opportunities, share knowledge and resources, and coordinate activities more effectively and efficiently.

Collaboration will play a key role in the near future as BPO providers and client organisations work together to fulfil their objectives of globalisation by working together across time zones, distances, and organisational and business boundaries to improve utilisation of resources. MarketsandMarkets believes that increasing enterprise productivity along with cost control measures is playing a key role in shaping the future of collaboration applications within enterprises across the globe.

These tools and appliances already play an important role in businesses around the world but it is a market with an exponential growth capability. According to Gartner the team collaboration and web conferencing software market was worth $US 774M in 2007. It predicts tis market to be worth $US 19.7 billion by the year 2015. The main forces driving the market are conferencing and collaboration to enhance productivity of businesses as well as employees.

Computer-based collaboration has been on the boards for quite some time. The challenge in developing such systems is, as Cameron Ackbury, director of Sales APAC and Japan, Mindjet points out, “human activity is highly flexible, nuanced, and contextualised and this needs to be reflected in the collaborative platform deployed within the organisation.” In other words these system need to be able to cater for social as well as cultural structures.

Computer based collaboration tools aim to facilitate, internally within an organisation as well as part of a network of supplier and client organisations:

• Accessing and combining of distributed assets and resources.
• • Sharing of knowledge, skills and best practice
• Reduction in travel, project management and administrative costs
• Speeding up product-development cycle time
• Improving agility, flexibility and speed of strategic relevant action across locations and organisational boundaries
• Synchronising activities across teams leading to efficient coordination within an entire supply chain or market channel

However, to be able to make collaboration happen and succeed requires a different management style to a strict traditional top-down approach. Ackbury comments, “People need to be educated and encouraged to work with their colleagues and co-workers, as well as management to share ideas and knowledge.”

Though collaboration offers numerous benefits, greater attention needs to be paid to the governance mechanisms put in place to manage a BPO relationship and corresponding contract. There are a number of potential issues and risks, which include:

• Losing control over strategic information
• Sharing of competitive data
• Who owns the IP of processes and methodologies jointly designed?

For a business process outsourcing (BPO) model to deliver sustainable value, it is essential that all parties involved work together closely to ensure that processes and technology are designed jointly, goals are aligned, activities are strongly coordinated and the benefits gleaned from innovation are jointly shared.