IT Outsourcing
Press Release, 10/301/02: IT Outsourcing: Following the Leaders May Well Lead to Failure
DiamondCluster Survey Finds 70% of Outsourcing Customers Have Terminated Relationships
CHICAGO, October 30, 2002 -- With outsourcing now an established part of many organizations' overall IT strategy, companies making their first outsourcing decision are looking to the early adopters for benchmarks and best practices. But following the leaders won't be nearly sufficient, and could lead to major problems, according to new research by DiamondCluster International (Nasdaq: DTPI). In fact, more than 70% of companies surveyed have prematurely terminated a past outsourcing agreement.
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Gartner, 10/28/02: Outsourced IT Infrastructure Disrupts Support World
Abstract: In 2007, up to 50 percent of inbound technical support incidents to IT manufacturers and independent software vendors will come from service intermediaries on behalf of their customers.
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Gartner, 10/28/02: Contrary Demands to Polarize Outsourcing Market in 2003-2005
Abstract: Outsourcers must satisfy client demand for both low-cost and high-business value. These seemingly contradictory demands will polarize service providers along infrastructure and business process lines.
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Windows Management
Giga, 10/28/02: Microsoft Windows Management Solutions: Point Products Still Need More Integration
Thomas Mendel and David Friedlander
For enterprise clients, the Microsoft Windows product line is becoming more important as a server platform. At the same time, the options and challenges of managing the environment are becoming more complex.
Microsoft offers many options and has announced a number of plans for managing its platforms and applications. This needs to be understood by any organization with a Windows server environment. While the Microsoft product portfolio does provide an added degree of manageability to a Windows-based environment, it does not yet form a complete and unified entity and is almost exclusively focused on the enterprise side of the market. The solutions are still not fully integrated and lack a granular level of problem diagnosis and repair functionality. The next version of Systems Management Server (SMS) (which, after many delays is due out in the first half of 2003) will alleviate some of these shortcomings by enhancing the metering and mobile capabilities and providing Active Directory (AD) integration on a group policy level. However, the Microsoft solutions still resemble a collection of point products more than modules of a coherent management structure.
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Security
Infoworld, 10/31/02: Flaw leaves Windows open to DoS attacks
By Joris Evers
A FLAW IN software code that implements a protocol for VPNs (virtual private networks) makes Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems vulnerable to DoS (denial-of-service) attacks, Microsoft warned late Wednesday.
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IDG, 10/30/02: WiFi eyes better wireless LAN security
Stephen Lawson, IDG News ServiceSan Francisco Bureau
The Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA), which certifies IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN products with the WiFi label, on Thursday will announce a new set of mechanisms to combat the security problem that has plagued wireless LANs.
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CIO, 10/30/02: Is the Sky Falling?
Everyone is talking about the appropriate reaction to the DNS root server attack, but no one is actually reacting.
By Scott Berinato
Last Monday around 4:30 p.m. Eastern, someone, it seems, tried to take down the Internet.
They did this by launching a well-known, brusque type of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, called an ICMP flood, on the Internet's 13 root DNS servers, the machines that translate words like "www.skyisfalling.com" into numbers like 35.128.23.1. (I made those up. Don't bother trying them.)
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EDS
The Wall Street Journal, 10/31/02: EDS Says Profit Fell 59%, Plans Cuts to Work Force
By ELLIOT SPAGAT
With some big contracts souring and corporate spending dropping, Electronic Data Systems Corp. said third-quarter profit fell 59%. The big computer-services company will cut its work force of 138,000 by as much as 4%, or 5,500 people.
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IBM
San Francisco Chronicle, 10/31/02: Big Blue's big gamble
IBM commits $10 billion to on-demand computing
Benjamin Pimentel, Chronicle Staff Writer
Turning up the heat on such rivals as Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, IBM unveiled a $10 billion plan Wednesday to sell computing power to companies in a way similar to how a utility sells electricity.
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