FSN - Outsourcing

53% of IT leaders plan to renegotiate their IT outsourcing (ITO) contracts as 47% encounter outright conflict

Over a quarter (26%) of IT leaders across Europe’s biggest outsourcing markets are dissatisfied with at least one of their IT outsourcing (ITO) contracts.

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Why true 'professionals' need Professional Services Automation (PSA)

Professional services are set to surge in 2013 according to this year’s Professional Services Maturity™ Benchmark report from Service Performance Insight (SPI Research). Yet professionals such as surveyors, consulting engineers and management consultants can find themselves poorly served by software solutions. But as Gary Simon, FSN’s managing editor reports, there are signs that new Cloud-based offerings for Professional Services Automation (PSA) are helping to turn the tide.

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UNIT4 Agresso confirms strategy and goes head to head with SAP and Oracle

The news earlier this month that UNIT4’s Agresso application is to form the backbone of the first Independent Shared Service Centre to be operated by the private sector on behalf of the UK Central Government is set to send ripples through the multi-billion pound shared services market. The multi-year deal, which was for an undisclosed sum (thought to be in the £10’s of millions) lays down the gauntlet to SAP and Oracle who have previously dominated the central government space.

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FinancialForce's customers rides surge in professional services with PSA solutions

FinancialForce.com, the cloud applications company, seems set to benefit from strong growth in the professional services market. The software vendor, which provides cloud-based PSA (Professional Services Automation) solutions says the Professional Services Maturity™ Benchmark report from Service Performance Insight (SPI Research) shows that the professional services market is likely to have a strong 2013. The independent report rated two FinancialForce Professional Services Automation (PSA) customers, NTT Centerstance and Perceptive Software, among the top five percent best-of-the-best performing Professional Services (PS) organizations benchmarked against more than 230 leading firms.

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The economy is flat so why are financials Cloud vendors growing at more than 90 percent per annum?

A procession of breathtaking growth rates from cloud vendors such as Adaptive Planning (CPM) and Financial Force (Financial Management) is in stark contrast to the underlying ‘growth’ of the global economy. Whilst the Eurozone struggles to show any growth at all and the US is limited to a couple of percent, both Adaptive Planning and Financial Force reported growth rates of 90 percent per annum.

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Spreadsheets under the spotlight again

A new emphasis on governance, risk and control (GRC) suggests that when spreadsheets become the de facto information system across the organisation then the production of key decision making and control information becomes fragmented and potentially unreliable as Ian Herbert FSN writer and Senior Lecturer in Management Accounting at the School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University finds out.

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The New Competitive Advantage - Strategic CFOs Embrace the Cloud

In the next three years, 53% of CFOs estimate that over half of their enterprise transactions will be delivered through the cloud, up from the 12 percent who use that delivery mechanism today. In this new FSN/Oracle white paper, Gary Simon, FSN’s managing editor provides CFOs with a strategic playbook on how to leverage the cloud to drive greater agility in response to economic and competitive change.

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Over a third of organisations say they are unhappy with their outsourcing provider

A recent live poll taken by SSON at SSOWeek in Orlando, illustrates that over a third of organisations say they are unhappy with their outsourcing provider. Delegates made up of 850+ shared services and outsourcing professionals (65% buyside) took part in a poll designed to discover more about their SSO (Shared Service Outsourcing) organisation and where they are in their outsourcing journey. FSN writer Michelle Simon looks at the survey.

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UNIT4 says demand for Cloud-based financials growing strongly

UNIT4, said last week that demand for its cloud-based solutions, which include not only the FinancialForce.com division but also its core Coda and ABW products, continue to gain momentum with increasing interest from potential clients. Even with this strategic change in the business, license revenue increased in Q3 by more than 25%. UNIT4’s Q3 revenue amounted to €110.7 million, an increase of 11% compared to revenue in Q3 2011.

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IT sourcing strategy – future successes are built on solid foundations

Decisions about IT sourcing have significant implications for the finance function as users and buyers of IT products and services – and more and more businesses are using more and more external IT resources. So FSN writer Lesley Meall has hunted down some tips on how to lay the right foundations for a successful sourcing strategy.

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