Outsourcing
Gartner, 3/18/03: The Economics of IT Services and Outsourcing in Europe
Few European businesses know the true cost and value of long-term outsourcing deals. Offshore sourcing lowers costs and “gain sharing” ensures business value, but poor relationship management is a big drain on value.
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IT Management
Giga, 3/18/03: CIOs' Concerns for 2003
Gene Leganza and Margo Visitacion
Contributing Analysts: Andy Bartels, Lou Agosta and Anton Hios
As 2002 fades into the past, CIOs may encounter a distinct feeling of déjà vu as they address their chief concerns for 2003. Little has changed and that slight loosening up of IT budgets for 2003 forecasted by a handful of optimists has yet to become visible. Alignment of IT with the business and coping with the budget take the top spots again this year in CIOs’ minds. However, many will struggle to make forward progress despite very lean staffing. The focus for many CIOs will be on revamping their organizations to deliver real value to the business by implementing formal processes that improve alignment and provide for a careful assessment of project options. Portfolio management appears as a management technique that affects the leading issues of alignment, cost control and organizational effectiveness. Hand in hand with alignment goes the CIOs’ ability to influence business strategy, and leading CIOs will make the most of IT-intensive opportunities to improve the bottom line through CRM, data warehouses and supply chain innovations. Security continues as a major issue that has yet to be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction and, not surprisingly, those integration headaches that plagued CIOs in 2002 have not disappeared.
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Giga, 3/18/03: Estimating Desktop Staffing Requirements
David Friedlander
What is the average ratio of desktop support technicians to PCs? What factors affect this ratio?
The estimated average ratio for full desktop support staffing, including install, move, add, change (IMAC) and break/fix activity is one technician for every 150 desktops supported and one technician for every 75 to 90 laptops supported. These technicians are responsible for all on-site or remote troubleshooting, repair, installation and removal. However, these averages will vary by as much as 500 percent based on the number of sites supported, the use of automation tools and the relative strength of the desktop management process. Companies with a high degree of automation will achieve much better support ratios than firms that have little or no automation and few processes.
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Gartner, 3/14/03: Midsize Businesses Face Unique IT Spending Challenges
Midsize business IT spending behaviors risk suboptimizing long-term flexibility and support costs. Balance between business value and operational efficiency must drive IT investments.
IT vendors continue to give increasing attention to the IT infrastructure needs of midsize businesses — a large but fragmented market opportunity. Leading IT vendors, across a variety of IT categories (storage vendors are the latest group to increase their focus on midsize businesses) are bringing a broad portfolio of products, services and solutions to market at price points that are attractive to midsize businesses.
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Gartner, 3/14/03: MSB IT Spending Benefactors: Channel Preferences, Plans
Price is a secondary selection criterion when midsize businesses choose IT vendors. Understanding what drives vendor selection and channel preference variances in the MSB market is crucial to success for IT solution providers.
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Avnet
Press Release, 3/20/03: Avnet Electronics Marketing Announces New Web-Based Tool to Improve Efficiency in Quotation Process; 'Quote Manager' Accelerates Quotation Process, Lowers Operational Costs
PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 20, 2003--Avnet Electronics Marketing, through an agreement with cost management solution provider Tradec, has introduced the latest tool in its Promiere suite from Avnet Supply Chain Services. Quote Manager, offered by Promiere, provides a Web-based solution that improves the efficiencies of the quotation process. With Quote Manager, Promiere customers will be able to accelerate the quotation process and reduce transaction costs, further enabling them to manage the supply chain more strategically, leading to improved profitability.
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Help Desk
TechWeb, 3/20/03: Network Associates Unveils Help-Desk Software
Network Associates has announced a new browser-based help desk-system targeting small- and mid-sized companies.
Magic Solutions HelpDesk IQ includes features for logging, tracking, and closing customer complaints; offers a self-service module so customers can use the Internet to solve problems on their own; and offers up more than 100 reports to delve into the dynamics of support performance.
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Business Process Outsourcing
Gartner, 3/18/03: BPO Pure Plays and Process Specialists Target SMB
By Robert H. Brown
SMBs are increasing their interest in BPO. At the same time, the market has seen an explosion in the number BPO vendors and affiliated service companies striving to win a piece of the action. Many of the largest BPO vendors are finding it difficult to penetrate the SMB sector without sacrificing the juicy profit margins they have become accustomed to among their large Fortune 1000 clients.
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Security
Wired News, 3/21/03: War Worms Inch Across Internet
By Michelle Delio
The U.S. military action in Iraq has stirred up computer virus writers and malicious hackers, who have apparently decided to vent by defacing websites and releasing e-mail worms that prey on people's fears and curiosity.
Antagonists and activists based in the United States, Europe and the Middle East are engaged in their own form of war games. Some are vandalizing websites, particularly government sites, scrawling scornful cybergraffiti or urging people to "make love not war."
And at least three e-mail viruses that their authors claim were released in response to the war have started making rounds on the Net.
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Giga, 3/18/03: Market Overview: IT Security
Steve Hunt, Jonathan Penn, Michael Rasmussen, Jan Sundgren
The IT security market is complex and convoluted. As a result, many organizations make assumptions about security that are not accurate, or engage in inefficient or ineffective projects. Giga finds that most companies spend too much money on the wrong security projects. Therefore, in an attempt to demystify the market and enable clearer decision-making, we have organized the market into categories, submarkets or niches and vendors. The categories include services, plus the four main categories of security technology — the four A’s (authentication, authorization, administration and audit). There are about 35 market niches and but that number fluctuates as vendors change their positioning and customers modify their preferences.
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Disaster Recovery
Giga, 3/18/03: SSL Remote Access VPNs Offer a Disaster Recovery Option
Jim Slaby
How can an enterprise design a disaster recovery (DR) scheme that enables users to temporarily work from home even if they’ve left their corporate laptops behind while evacuating their primary work location?
Remote access infrastructure is of course a key element of many DR plans, because it enables employees to work from home or other temporary worksites in the wake of a natural or artificial disaster. But relying on employees to bring home their laptops for this purpose has an Achilles heel: Laptops often get left behind (as they probably should be) during rapid building evacuations. Most companies cannot or will not invest in huge pools of networked, corporate-standard desktops in standby DR locations, expecting that many users will be able to work from employee-owned PCs at home, using whatever Internet access service they have sourced for personal use. From a technology standpoint, these users are equivalent to day extenders, and thus become a security and help desk nightmare if equipped with an IPsec virtual private network (VPN) client for remote access.
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Microsoft
Giga, 3/13/03: Microsoft Office Professional May Already Be the Lower-Cost Alternative
Ken Smiley
Is there a less-expensive alternative to Microsoft Office Pro?
The answer depends on how an organization defines less expensive. If by less expensive only the upfront costs to acquire the software are considered, then there are a couple of other options, namely: Microsoft Office standard edition, Sun StarOffice and Corel WordPerfect Office, which are commonly considered as alternatives to Microsoft Office Professional. If the expense of integrating software different from what the organization already owns and retraining users on the new software is included, then the overall cost of a migration to a different office suite may in fact be higher. The only way to determine the result is to conduct some form of ROI analysis using a tool, such as Giga’s Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) methodology, that examines costs, benefits and flexibility through a risk filter.
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Giga, 3/18/03: First Quarter 2003: Office Suite Installed Base
Ken Smiley
What percentage of IT shops in Fortune 1000 companies are still running Office 97? What is the percentage break down for all office productivity suites and how large is the overall market?
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Business Process
Giga, 3/14/03: Best Practices: How to Make Collaboration Work
Daniel W. Rasmus
The success of collaboration requires three primary elements. The first and most important is a collaborative culture that recognizes the value of collaboration and rewards those who model collaborative behavior. The second is the establishment of a solid collaboration technology foundation that minimizes choices among similar products but provides the widest range of channels to accommodate varying communication needs within and between business processes. The third is the presence of processes for aligning investments with the business, discovering collaborative opportunities, methodologies for modeling collaborative behavior, and integration with planning, to provide perspectives and priorities for investments in collaborative work.
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