Desktop Outsourcing
Giga, 12/10/02: Classifying Outsourcers in the Distributed Desktop
Robert McNeill
Giga believes there are five communities of service providers offering desktop outsourcing capabilities to
end-user organizations:
1. Value-added resellers (VARs) (CompuCom)
2. Desktop outsourcers (Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HP), CompuCom, Getronics, Unisys)
3. Infrastructure outsourcers (IBM GS, EDS, SBS, HP and CSC)
4. Offshore outsourcers (Wipro, Infosys, TCS)
5. Niche managed desktop service providers (CenterBeam, Everdream)
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Giga, 12/11/02: Desktop Outsourcing Offerings Continue to Expand
Robert McNeill
Desktop service offerings have become largely commoditized; therefore, service providers are competing on price. To avoid this scenario, many of the service providers are attempting to broaden the scope of the offerings to include asset management, help desk, server management and local area network (LAN) management. The increasing bundling of services included in desktop outsourcing will ultimately mean good news for customers as pricing falls and quality becomes more consistent at all price points.
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Giga, 12/11/02: A Checklist for Desktop Outsourcing Due Diligence
Robert McNeill
Prior to issuing a request for proposal (RFP), the primary activity should revolve around discovery. All of the IT assets, IT staff and their skills, current costs and existing support arrangements are critical elements of the due diligence. End users can either conduct the discovery themselves or pay an outsourcer to do it. Most desktop outsourcers (including IBM Global Services, EDS, CSC and Siemens Business Services) offer this service.
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Giga, 12/12/02: Desktop Outsourcing Critical Success Factors — What Not to Outsource
Managing outsourcers and suppliers of IT services has become a more important activity as end users aim to reduce the number of external suppliers in the enterprise and consolidate the many IT initiatives that have until now been largely decentralized. When introducing new outsourcers or extending existing desktop outsourcing engagements, it is important to retain the following key functions in order to keep coordination and control of the desktop outsourcing engagement.
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Giga, 12/11/02: Desktop Outsourcing Service Provider Selection: Check for Use of IT Asset Management
Robert McNeill
Giga believes CompuComand and SBS North America are the market leaders in IT asset management (ITAM) consulting and implementation services in the US. Both also provide quality help desk and desktop outsourcing capabilities. To begin with, combining help desk and desktop outsourcing is a good idea because it improves the service provider’s (in this case, CompuCom or SBS) ability to fix end-user problems at the desktop quickly and efficiently. Tight integration of IT asset management and help desk data can help streamline agent flows, offering benefits such as reduced incident handling and resolution time.
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Outsourcing
Giga, 12/10/02: Application Upgrades Providing Healthy Business for Consultants
Paul Hamerman
Recent software vendor activity compelling customers to upgrade to the latest releases of their software has created a healthy market for application upgrade services, benefiting consulting firms as well as the services units of the vendors themselves. Major application releases such as PeopleSoft 8 and Oracle 11i, which involve significant architectural changes and redesigned user interfaces, have proven to be considerably more challenging than typical software upgrades. Consulting services are a substantial out-of-pocket cost for major application upgrade projects, but the consultant skills are often essential for software customers to make the transition.
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Giga, 12/10/02: When to Consider Hosted E-Mail Archiving Services
Erica Rugullies
Organizations that are considering implementation of e-mail archiving have a choice between an internal implementation and hosted services. Most vendors offer e-mail archiving capabilities via a licensed software model. Some such as Iron Mountain (www.ironmountain.com) and ZANTAZ (www.zantaz.com) offer an e-mail archiving service. Iron Mountain’s service, called Digital Archives for E-Mail, is based on software from KVS (www.kvsinc.com). ZANTAZ offers a service called DigitalSafe, which is based on the company’s own e-mail archiving software.
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Gartner, 12/10/02: IBM Tops in IT Management Market Share
IBM Global Services captured the top position in every region with the exception of one — North America — where EDS has a slim lead with a 14.03 percent market share compared with IBM's 13.09 percent (see Table 1) as well as on a worldwide basis (see Table 2).
Among the worldwide top 100 IT management vendors in 2001, gains were more substantial than losses. The five vendors with the largest growth rates among the top 100 in 2001 are Logica (67.4 percent), Capita Group (45.2 percent), National Computer Systems (Singapore; 42.2 percent), Nihon Unisys (38.8 percent) and Transiciel (37.2 percent). Those suffering the greatest drops in 2001 compared with 2000 were Nortel (negative 38 percent), INES (negative 21.9 percent), Computer Associates and Analysts International (both with negative 18.4 percent) and Lucent Technologies (negative 15.9 percent).
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Giga, 12/13/02: The Increased Use of Risk/Reward in IT Services Contracts
With such a strong focus on business value and cost reductions going into 2003, and a desire by CIOs and CFOs to incentivize service providers to be accountable for that value, we expect to see many more deals containing risk/reward or gain-sharing components next year. We do not expect a majority of deals to have this pricing structure as the only schema used, rather we expect components of a deal or certain services within the deal to be designed this way.
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IDG, 12/16/02: 2002: IT services landscape changes markedly
Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News ServiceLatin America Bureau
The landscape of the IT services market shifted significantly this year, and the changes sent vendors and clients scrambling to adapt to the new and sometimes rocky terrain.
Some vendors expanded, as was the case of the world's biggest IT services provider, IBM Corp.'s Global Services division, which acquired PwC Consulting. Others disappeared, like accounting giant and IT consultant Andersen Worldwide. Many struggled, the most notable example being Electronic Data Systems Corp. (EDS), the world's second-largest IT services provider, which lost business and invited a U.S. government probe due to unmet financial expectations.
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Mobile
Giga, 12/12/02: Consolidated Mobile Synch, Security and Management Not Available
No single vendor can provide bandwidth-sensitive mobile management tools coupled with security policy implementation mechanisms and e-mail/personal information management (PIM) synchronization across both laptops and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Organizations looking to single-source a mobile solution to intelligently manage bandwidth to mobile platforms, secure devices and enforce security policies, provide synchronization for e-mail and PIM and manage hardware and software on mobile devices must source solutions from multiple vendors. This will remain the case throughout 2003 and into 2004.
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Microsoft
ZDNet, 12/16/02: Microsoft beefs up security on .Net
By Martin LaMonica
Microsoft on Monday released software tools that it claims will allow developers to create more secure and reliable Web services.
The software maker debuted Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 1.0, a package of add-ons to its .Net software that adhere to the latest standards on security, message routing and transmitting file attachments via Web services. Developers can download the software for free and work with it in conjunction with Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net development tool bundle.
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