The Economist has a post on how Facility Operations companies are attempting to expand beyond their current markets. This market is huge.
Facilities management
Service elevators
Big outsourcing firms find that escaping the crowd is not so easy
Mar 15th 2014 | PARIS | From the print edition
IT IS a sprawling, unseen, unglamorous industry that is hard to define and harder still to measure. Outsourced facilities-management firms clean offices, guard premises, feed students, manage heating and lighting, move prisoners from cell to workshop, and so on, for customers who prefer to focus on their core activities.
Employing millions, outsourcing firms have combined revenues that some put as high as $1 trillion a year. The market is most established in Europe and North America, though it is on the rise in Asia too (see chart). Now the structure of the business is changing, as firms that used to specialise in one sort of outsourced service increasingly aim to be all things to all men, and trip over each other in the process.
One company that caught my eye is Sodexo because a friend works in the food service business andI was curious if their company does any work in data centers.
ISS’s larger main rival, Sodexo, sees the market in much the same light. The family-controlled French firm was originally known for running canteens in offices, hospitals and schools, diversifying into lucrative luncheon vouchers and employee benefits. It grew big in the 1980s as more businesses joined the outsourcing trend and bigger still when governments, beginning with Britain’s, started setting up public-private partnerships to build and run facilities. When “soft” services like catering and cleaning showed signs of becoming commodities, Sodexo expanded into “hard” services such as building maintenance and energy management. Acquisitions came thick and fast, helping Sodexo increase its foreign operations too.
Digging a bit I found there are 24 data centers the company lists, but I don’t know of any of data center friends who use Sodexo.
Many more friends have been switching to Norland Managed Services.
