Outsourcing
TechWeb, 3/12/03: IT plans sending more services overseas
By Ed Frauenheim
Although this week's Lehman Brothers conference on software and information technology services is being held a few miles from Silicon Valley, much of the talk centers on transferring tech work halfway around the world.
Companies and industry experts who made presentations Tuesday highlighted the growing shift of IT operations from high-cost countries to lower-wage locales such as India and the Philippines.
"Offshore has gone mainstream," said Gordon Coburn, CFO of Cognizant Technology Solutions, a New Jersey-based IT services company with offices in five Indian cities. "We're still in the early stages of this trend."
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IT Management
CIO, 3/1/03: When the Mission Changes, IT Does Too
For Washington Mutual, a passion for customers prompted the bank to reinsource all of its IT functions that directly affected its customers
WHEN JERRY GROSS came aboard as executive vice president and CIO of Washington Mutual in June 2001, he had an open mind about outsourcing. The Seattle-based bank's 10-year, $533 million outsourcing deal with IBM Global Services (IGS) dated back to 1996. As part of that deal, IGS provided desktop support, network services, help desk, network management, architecture and strategy for the $17.7 billion company. Having just inked a deal with IGS himself in his previous position as the group executive of technology, operations and e-commerce of Sydney, Australia-based Westpac Banking, Gross wasn't averse to the idea.
To learn the lay of the land, Gross conducted focus groups with employees inside and outside IT, reviewed customer satisfaction data and compared notes with his peers. "I went through a fairly exhaustive process to find out what people's perceptions were of the services we were providing to them as customers, both internal and external," Gross says.
He found that IT's service levels were less than satisfying. For instance, it took up to a month to deploy a new computer for an employee. Another red flag: Calls to the help desk weren't getting answered in acceptable time. As a result, IT was getting a bad name.
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Security
The New York Times, 3/12/03: Military to Clamp Down on E-Mail
By MATT RICHTEL
Concerned that sensitive information might leak out, some units of the United States military are starting to clamp down on e-mail communication from their soldiers and sailors, who have been using it from ships, bases and even desert outposts to stay in touch with family and friends.
The uncertainty underscores the double-edged nature of a technology that is providing a new opportunity for instantaneous interaction from remote locations, a development the Pentagon believes is helping to improve morale in the field and among relatives back home.
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TechWeb, 3/12/03: As The Worms Turn
By Larry Lange
The term "worm" comes from The Shockwave Rider, a 1972 sci-fi novel in which a tapeworm program liberated data as it proliferated through networks. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center security researchers John Shoch and Jon Hupp appropriated it in 1982 when they automated the installation of Ethernet-performance measuring tools on 100 computers at Xerox PARC. They devised a program that could send and install itself, but the program developed a bug—and to their surprise the bad code spread across the network as well.
Defined as destructive programs that replicate themselves across networks, today's software worms fall into two categories: those that arrive as e-mail attachments, which when opened spread themselves in a burst of new messages; and those that exploit computers with security flaws and use new hosts to scan for the same flaw in other machines—all without human interaction.
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Messaging
C|net, 3/12/03: The quest for indestructible e-mail
By Michael Kanellos
In a pinch, many people might be willing to gnaw off their left arm rather than give up e-mail for a few days. MessageOne is trying to ensure no one ever has to make that choice.
The Austin, Texas-based start-up has developed a system for immediately backing up and restoring e-mail and other communication services in case of an outage. Let's say a meteor vaporizes the mail server in your regional office in western Australia. The outside world will never know.
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TechWeb, 3/11/03:
Report: Businesses Must Control IM Now Or Pay Later March 11, 2003
A Yankee Group report says companies that don't address enterprise instant messaging run the risk of having it grow unregulated.
By Gregg Keizer, TechWeb News
Businesses had better address enterprise instant-messaging issues now or run the risk of allowing IM to proliferate within the company without rules and safeguards, a Yankee Group report released Tuesday said.
In its "Vendors Race To Get A Piece Of The Enterprise IM Market" report, the advisory firm lays out the case for enterprise instant messaging, notes that unsupervised instant messaging can potentially prove catastrophic for businesses, and outlines several recommendations that companies can use to make intelligent enterprise IM decisions.
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Microsoft
Infoworld, 3/12/03: Microsoft to focus more on management
Company realigns business units, renames group Enterprise Management division
By Ashlee Vance March 12, 2003
Microsoft has realigned a pair of business units to reflect an expansion of its plans to manage every piece of a customer's hardware from the PC to servers and storage systems, the company said Tuesday.
Microsoft has decided to rebrand its Management Business group as the Enterprise Management division, said David Hamilton, director of the newly formed group at Microsoft. Along with the renaming, this move will place three management products formerly shepherded by the Windows group under the charge of Bob Muglia, a senior vice president at the company and head of its storage unit.
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