Cloud-based solutions are not being lost on Asia-Pacific insurers or other businesses reviewing their managed and hosted IP voice service.

Mark Phillips (CIO)

Asia-Pacific insurers are planning to increase their IT budgets in 2011–2012 and — interesting for an industry that is traditionally slow to adopt new technologies — 43 per cent of respondents in a new study have already deployed or are experimenting with private Cloud.

29 per cent of insurers said they expect budgets for both internal and internal IT to increase by more than 6 per cent, with the majority (53 per cent) expecting them to increase somewhat.

According to Ovum’s Business Trends: Asia-Pacific Insurance Technology Investment Strategies, insurers are also increasingly leveraging business intelligence (BI) tools to target customer retention. Indeed, 86 per cent rated this as the most important driver for BI usage.

Notably, 51 per cent said they are now comfortable using outsourcing such as business process outsourcing (BPO), while 56 per cent are using IT function outsourcing (ITO) for five of the 10 IT functions covered in the survey: Network services, desktop management, IT security, applications development, and application management.

Compared to their counterparts in the US as well as Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Asia-Pacific insurers are more proactively opting for service-oriented architecture (SOA), software-as-a-service (SaaS), and rich internet applications (RIAs).

In a separate study, Ovum has also found that the revenue of managed and hosted IP voice services in the Asia-Pacific will grow almost three times over the next five years to hit $US3 billion ($A2.95 billion) in 2016, as enterprise increasingly migrates to opex-based service models.

“The preference will continue to be for on-premise IP PBXs but many companies will consider relying on a service provider for hosting and system management,” said Ovum senior analyst Claudio Castelli.

“There is hope for service providers building their Cloud-based communication offerings and we expect the preference for the hosted approach to rise as more offerings are released into the marketplace and customers realise the benefits of the new Cloud models, such as faster deployment times, high flexibility to upscale (or downscale), outsourced management and utility pricing.”

Source: CIO

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Phil Hassey BPO Researcher muses over the Asia/Pacific BPO market landscape

My first BPO research was undertaken in 2000, when I wrote one of the first reports on the Asia Pacific BPO market focused on CRM BPO. The future was bright at that time as the big offshore providers of CRM services such as Teletech and Sitel increasing investments in offshore centres, particularly in the Philippines with a plan for focus on delivery of services to local Asia Pacific clients. At the same time in late 2000, IBM stated at an AP analyst briefing that they would not be interested in the BPO marketplace.

Whilst a lot has changed in the 11 or years since, embracing of BPO has not been as strong as anticipated. BPO across the Asia Pacific is still a market with clearly unfulfilled potential both in terms of market demand and service provider capability. Obviously the two are linked. IBM, driven by CRM outsourcing through the Daksh acquisition is now a leader in non-transactional BPO in the Asia Pacific region alongside Accenture. The call centre/CRM outsourcing market did not mature nearly as quickly as expected.
In Australia, the AP BPO market is at its most mature. However by US standards, unlike IT Outsourcing, it still clearly lags in terms of customer uptake. The last five years have seen a lot of interest in BPO, but ultimately limited commitment from enterprise. I like to joke that 2-3 years ago, there were more BPO pilots in Australia than at Heathrow or JFK airports. The reasons for the lack of enterprise commitment are varied, they include more organised labour forces in Finance and HR and customer care, and outsourcing fatigue through publicised IT Outsourcing problems. Highlighting the opportunity that exists in the market, the lack of providers means that supply side issues are just as important as buy side issues. Accenture and IBM aside, there are very limited services providers that have the requisite scale to successfully provide capabilities in markets in Asia Pacific. This is of course a chicken and egg situation. The deals need to be there to get the investment and I believe the deals will not happen until the investment is made. Some bold calls will be successful if researched well enough.

Across Asia more broadly, strategic BPO is even further from Australia in terms of maturity. The same issues as Australia remain, in a positive note increasing numbers of enterprises are becoming more familiar with the benefits of BPO. Many of the individual country markets do take their lead from a targeted number and type of companies; vendors should firstly identify these enterprises, and then focus on them in order to drive BPO adoption more broadly.

Naturally enough, it must be repeated regularly that Asia Pacific is a large and incredibly diverse market that does not take kindly to being generalised in sweeping statements. We have half the world’s population and workforce. A strategy that works in Singapore may not work in neighboring Malaysia; something that works in India will definitely not work in China. Understanding these subtleties is critical and without practical experience, my experience has highlighted that it takes time and several false steps before success can be enjoyed.

You can read more about Phil’s background here, email him at phil@capioIT.com

TPI Index Asia-Pacific, a business consultancy provider, released information on the value of contracts secured during the first six months of 2010. For the first half of 2010, Asia Pacific outsourcing providers secured only US$2.3 billion, which was less compared to the first half of 2009 and 2008.

Value of contracts first 6 months (in billion US$)

This year’s performance so far was caused by a decrease in contracts worth over US$200 million. Only one ‘mega deal’ was secured within the first half of this year. From the total contracts secured within six months, around 83 per cent were worth less than US$100 million.

% of contracts worth < US$100 million

Compared to the numbers of the previous years, 83 per cent is only for the first half of 2010.

Michael Rehkopf, TPI North Asia partner and director, said, “The Asia-Pacific market is very volatile and several deals have been put on hold.”

With the IT outsourcing sector, there was a considerable drop in value of contracts as well. US$6.6 billion in total contract value (TCV) is needed for the second half of 2010 to be at par with 2009.

According to TPI, financial services, media, manufacturing, and telecom services, which are usually strong markets, performed sluggishly. The Asia Pacific region needs to step up in securing deals for the next half of this year, preferably worth more than US$200 million to reach this year’s goal of US$11 billion.

In terms of BPO contracts so far, 18 were secured. This was almost an 80 per cent increase compared to 2009. Ten more contracts are expected to be finalised.

Australia and India took most of the pie. Australia got 42 per cent, while India got 32 per cent of the TCV.

Telecom service providers worldwide paid network equipment vendors US $50.4 billion in 2009 for outsourced services, according to a recent report from Infonetics Research.

Infonetics said that much of the growth in outsourced services is coming from the Asia Pacific area and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa).

Infonetics also said it expects that segment of the outsourced services market to grow by a further 45 per cent by 2014.

Network maintenance, network build, network planning and design, and application service delivery are the biggest revenue-generating tasks that equipment manufacturers provide for telecom service providers, according to the report.