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“How does a large software project get to be one year late?  One day at a time!”  

-Fred Brooks, former IBM employee and OS/360 developer

2013 was not a stellar year for public sector outsourcing.  As we reported in an earlier blog article, Indiana is appealing judgment in an ongoing court battle with IBM over a troubled welfare claims processing project.  Agencies in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Australia also hit the news.

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In previous posts (Proposed Changes to UK’s TUPE will impact outsourcing deals, The UK Government consults on proposed changes to the TUPE regulations) we highlighted the UK Government’s proposed changes to the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 (“TUPE 2006“). The UK Government has now finalised these changes,

resulting in the Collective Redundancies and Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) (Amendment) Regulations 2014 (“Amended TUPE Regulations“). 

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) also published useful guidance which helps to explain the changes made to TUPE 2006.  Generally speaking, the Amended TUPE Regulations brought into effect the changes discussed in our previous post,

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In a look forward at 2014, Joe Nash commented in Stephanie Overby’s CIO.com article on what to expect in the year head. He said:

At the very least, expect an increase in automation generally. ‘With the cost benefits of labor arbitrage being largely harvested and labor costs inevitably on the rise, CIOs will need to look for alternative opportunities to reduce or contain operating costs,’ says Joe Nash,

principal in Pillsbury’s global sourcing group. ‘That means looking for ways through automation to reduce the amount of work it takes to complete an IT function or service, not the cost of the labor to do it.’

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Labor arbitrage has long been a feature of ITOs . With off-shore to on-shore staffing ratios in the 65:35 to 75:25 range, suppliers have long used arbitrage to deliver significantly lower pricing. IT organizations have made many a CFO happy when recommending deals featuring 20%+ savings, especially done under the pressure of corporate “blood” drives to cut costs. Unescapably, however, corporate “blood” drives are a lot like the girl scout cookie sales season, just when you think you gotten everyone happy, here comes the next guy trying to boost his kid’s financial performance.

Unfortunately, our one trick pony is also a one-time pony, especially with deals where off to on shore ratios have been maximized. When the CFO next comes calling, our pony is fresh out of tricks; there is no more arbitrage to be had — at least not from the same delivery market. What is next? Shall we pack our bags in Bangalore and head off to a Chinese Model City or perhaps see what kind of benefit stream enrichment can be had in Ghana or Mauritius? Most buyers, we suspect, will not find this an appealing prospect when viewed through an operating risk management lens.

Maybe it is time for a change in approach. Instead of continuing to try to derive benefit from pushing on the P lever, maybe some answer can be found by putting pressure onto the Q factor in the equation. Rather than buying cheaper labor, how about we find a way to use less labor. One way to reduce labor demand is to gain leverage through standardization (ala Google and Amazon), but heterogeneous installed bases, which reflect most of our clients’ environments, are notoriously resistant to standardization efforts. Good idea, best practice even, just not responsive to the CFO demand for results sooner rather than later. So then why not turn to the reason why we have computers in the first place — to do things faster and cheaper than people can do them. How about the shoemaker’s children taking some of their own medicine and using their own technology on themselves? Why not use technology to automate IT business processes and reduce the number of people needed to operate these complex infrastructure configurations? Assuming we can keep labor rates in roughly the same range, fewer people equals a lower labor cost, which equals lower prices, which means happier CFOs. And happier CFOs are a good thing for CIOs.

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In a look back at 2013, Mario Dottori commented in Stephanie Overby’s CIO.com article on grading our initial 2013 IT Outsourcing predictions that we discussed last December.

Third-Generation Deals Enter Uncharted Territory It was true that many of the latest generation of outsourcing deals were more complex. But the advantage did not go to the incumbents. Quite the opposite came to pass. “Incumbents are always ‘sticky’ because of high — or perceived high — barriers to exit,” says Mario Dottori, partner in the global sourcing practice at law firm Pillsbury. “However, we have seen more movement away from incumbents where there are lower barriers to exist. Customers are balancing the switching costs and risks with significant improved service delivery and meaningful reduction in spend.”

Check out the full article in CIO.com

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The High Court of England and Wales has recently decided that a contract can, in principle, be made in two separate jurisdictions at the same time if the contract does not include choice of law and jurisdiction clauses. In this situation, either party could seek to enforce the contract in its home jurisdiction.

In Conductive Inkjet Technology Ltd v Uni-Pixel Displays Inc [2013] EWHC 2968 (Ch), the court considered a dispute between two parties, one based in England and the other in Texas. The agreement in question was a non-disclosure agreement, which did not include a choice of law and jurisdiction clause as the parties were not able to agree on one during negotiations. The parties agreed the contract in an email exchange, and it was then signed by Conductive Inkjet Technology (CIT) in England and by Uni-Pixel Displays (UPD) in Texas. CIT then claimed that UPD made use of certain proprietary information in breach of the agreement and sought permission to serve claims on UPD in England. UPD challenged this by arguing that English courts did not have jurisdiction in the matter.

To recap the English law position on contract formation, the general rule is that a contract is made at the time and place where acceptance of the relevant offer is communicated to the offeror. There are two main rules as to when acceptance is communicated:

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As part of its UK Employment Law Review in 2012, the UK Government announced that it intended to remove the third-party harassment liability provision from section 40(2) of the Equality Act 2010. This provision was repealed on 1 October 2013. This post considers the impact of the repeal and whether employers are safe from claims made by their employees based on harassment by their outsourcing or other third party contractors.

Background

In October 2010, section 40(2) of the Equality Act introduced the concept that employers could be liable for harassment of their employees by a third party where the harassment was persistent and based on a protected characteristic. Under this provision, employees could bring a claim against their employer if they had been subjected to discriminatory harassment by third parties during the course of their employment on at least two occasions and their employer had failed to take any reasonably practicable steps to prevent the harassment. This provision had potentially far reaching impact as employers became potentially liable for acts committed by third parties such as their suppliers, customers or visitors.

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On 19 November, Datateam won permission to appeal from an unreported decision of District Judge Bell sitting in the Reigate County Court on 12 June. The facts of the case, which related to unpaid invoices for database maintenance services, are not of interest except to say that the services agreement did not establish a contractual lien over the customer’s data, that is, it did not contain an express term requiring the return of the data to the customer at the end of the contract period.) What is of interest is that when it hears the appeal, the Court of Appeal will consider “whether or not a service provider can claim a [common law] lien over electronic data which it manages.”

In English law, a common law lien normally arises in respect of tangible property but not in the case of intangible property such as intellectual property. The classic example is a mechanic who is entitled to exercise a lien over (hold onto) a customer’s car until the customer settles his bill. However, electronic data is intangible property. In granting Datateam permission to appeal, Lady Justice Arden commented that there is no English authority “which establishes that a [common law] lien is exercisable over intangible property.” She thought this was “a point of law… worthy of consideration… since it could have very considerable implications if there was no lien.”

The Court of Appeal’s decision is eagerly awaited.

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In the early days of outsourcing IT as a managed service, it was not at all unusual for a managed services price to be all inclusive of assets, services and facilities. That bundle of services and assets usually came with a “black box” style pricing that was devoid of transparency and created a myriad of challenges from changes in technology to addressing equipment refresh. Worst of all, these “all in” deals made it virtually impossible to fire your service provider because of the challenges of removing the assets from the supplier upon termination. Despite these challenges, there are times when a customer’s asset strategy still calls for acquiring assets from their service provider. In those circumstances, customers should be aware of the inherent risks in including IT assets in an IT managed services agreement and structure the transaction to minimize the risks.

Assets could be included for just about any service category of a managed services agreement. For the purpose of this discussion we are going to focus on the Servers and Storage assets that comprise the central compute services for a company.

Margin Expansion

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