July has been an eventful month in the outsourcing industry. Here’s a rundown of the significant events that took place in BPO companies this month.

Global outsourcing breaks all-time records in first half of 2015

ISG’s latest global Outsourcing Index has announced a surge in worldwide outsourcing records in the second quarter of 2015—a milestone reached despite the 7% year-on-year decline in the annual contract value (ACV) for the first half of this year ($6.2 billion).

The following breakthroughs occurred despite the first quarter of 2015 being considered as one of the slowest quarters of the last decade: a record of 451 signed contracts amounting to $5 million, and a high of 754 agreements in the first half of the year.

According to ISG, this significant increase in activity was prompted by the growing trend among buyers who steadily negotiate a higher number of deals at a lower value. This purpose of this is to avoid getting locked into long-term contracts at a time when ITO and BPO companies are heavily affected by upsurges in new technologies and operating models.

Outsourcing becoming more popular among biomanufacturing companies

According to the 12th annual biomanufacturing report from BioPlan Associates, the use of outsourcing and off-shoring have now become more popular among biopharmaceutical companies compared to previous years. This is due mainly to the companies’ desire to cut costs and further define their core competencies.

In the near future, budgets for outsourcing at individual facilities are expected to increase by 13% over the next 12 months, which is a slight decrease from last year’s 13.5%. It is still, however, an increase from 2013’s previously anticipated 10.4% increase. The report also stated that 17% of biomanufacturers will be outsourcing a significantly larger portion of validation services over the next two years than are currently being outsourced.

Tech industry replacing algorithms with the work of actual humans

An ironic twist in the tech industry is that algorithm-related jobs are now being outsourced to real people, instead of relying solely on computers. Wired staff writer Julia Greenberg has reported on a new hiring trend, which is seemingly evident in tech companies such as Apple, for starters.

Because, “algorithms aren’t enough”, Apple is now seeing that only humans are capable of carrying out certain processes for the company’s upcoming newsreader app.

Greenberg says that Apple isn’t alone in this new hiring endeavor. Numerous other tech giants are seeking real live humans to do jobs computers cannot do as efficiently. For instance, Twitter has hinted on a job posting for their new upcoming event-based feeds. Similar sentiments were also found in job postings for Snapchat—whose content are believed to be best curated by actual humans, owing to the fact that Snapchat’s vision is to share real, live stories.

“Algorithms are really good at culling through a huge amount of data to bring sort of a more personalized answer, but they’re not good at adding emotion,” says Greenberg. She also adds that computers are “really bad at understanding context in social norms.”

Cloud outsourcing as the new IT trend in Disaster Recovery

IT managers are continuously implementing cloud applications to lower hardware and energy costs, gain increased flexibility and improved resiliency, and cultivate faster responsiveness to ever-evolving and new applications.

When disaster arises, however, IT managers have found their disaster recovery techniques and hardware configuration to not be at par with ideal strategies. The pace is not enough to keep up with changes in production environment, and they are stuck in the pre-cloud era.

Thankfully, experts have discovered that the best way to ensure a fast recovery is to have replacement equipment which is easily accessible at an off-site location, along with the necessary software and configuration to allow data to be transferred more quickly and efficiently. This sound practice involves the use of a remote data center with servers, storage, networking equipment and internet access.