Capgemini is once again splashing its cash.
The services company, which has been raking in the dosh from big contracts from BAA and EDF, has announced it's discussing money with Apax Partners and the Prosodie management team.
It wants to buy Prosodie. It believes that by getting the multi-channel services operator on side and into its worldwide empire, it can offer its bigwig clients a more detailed IT operating business model.
Basically, the company would form part of Capgemini's New Business Model service line, which is a range of services based on proprietary features and invoiced on a pay-as-you-go basis.
But it won't be buying Prosodie at a loss as the company made some serious wonga despite the recession. It has seen increasing profits over the past four years, which has led to Capgemini forking out around £336 million (€382 million or $552 million). The buy will see Prosodie throwing in two recently-announced acquisitions, Internet-Fr in France and LevelIP in Italy.
In this case Capgemini claims that it will buy the company in cash from its net cash balance - well, it's got enough.
Authorisation will be sought from the French competition authorities but if they say yes then the transaction is expected to be finalised by the end of July.
Capgemini will continue to get richer, with research showing that the IT services market will return to healthy growth to reach revenues of $756 billion in 2015.
That's the latest from Ovum, which predicts that the global market will grow by 4.4 percent during the next four years.
This comes as a result of pent-up demand and a slowly improving economy. However, growth for 2011 is still not back to pre-recession levels.
That doesn't seem to have affected the likes of IBM, which continued to be the world’s number one provider of IT services, followed by HP and Fujitsu in 2010, despite all facing negative growth last year.
Ovum adds that most vendors which improved their market share and their ranking were Indian-heritage firms such as Infosys, Wipro and TCS, which moved one place to be ranked 13th. Japanese firms such as NEC, Hitachi and Otsuka Shokai also made gains.
Of the all the IT service lines, business process outsourcing is said to experience the strongest growth from 2010 to 2015, followed by infrastructure-led outsourcing and support services.
