Outsourcing
Giga, 6/30/03: Challenges of Increased Self-Service Automation in Help Desk Outsourcing
Robert McNeill
Can you document the challenges of implementing a self-service technology within a help desk outsourcing contract?
Service providers are taking advantage of new e-service/e-support technologies to increase self-service adoption within the enterprise. This is especially prevalent in help desk operations, particularly for password reset. Forgotten passwords are one of the leading support problems reported into help desk organizations. According to the Help Desk Institute, nearly 30 percent of help desk calls are password related, and this translates into a significant cost for level-one help desk operations.
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Computerworld, 6/30/03: Corporation Caught In the Cross Hairs
A focused e-mail attack sends our worried security manager scrambling to track down the source.
By VINCE TUESDAY
My company deals with large electronic financial transactions on a regular basis, and I worry that this makes us the perfect target for a focused attack on our networks. This issue had been a theoretical one for me, however, until last week.
We have outsourced our e-mail monitoring to New York-based Messagelabs Inc., which offers us a guarantee that no malicious code will get past its defenses. To back up that claim, it's admirably paranoid. The company's statistics show that about one in 270 of our e-mails contains a virus. Last week, we saw a surge of suspicious e-mails. Normally, this signals a big virus outbreak, but there was no mention of this on any of the antivirus Web sites. The malicious code Messagelabs stopped was simply characterized as "Possible new Trojan software detected."
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IT Management
Giga, 6/30/03: Server-Based Computing Market Trends: 2006 to 2008
David Friedlander
What are the long-term trends in the server-based computing market for the next three to five years?
The server-based computing (SBC) market has matured and will remain relatively stable during the next three years. Major market forces that are likely to affect SBC in the long term include the proliferation of mobile devices in the enterprise, potential client platform diversification and improvements in software distribution and desktop management technology. Fundamentally, the value of SBC will shift from reducing the management costs for desktop applications to managing mobile access to rich client applications from a diverse set of device platforms.
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Giga, 6/30/03: Desktop and Mobile Management Market Trends: 2006 to 2008
David Friedlander
What are the long-term trends in the desktop and mobile management market for the next three to five years?
The desktop and mobile management market will consolidate significantly in the next three to five years as it converges with the overall systems management and asset management markets. Integration between desktop and mobile management, network systems management (NSM), help desk, asset management and related configuration management tools will become increasingly important. Additionally, automated diagnostic, self-healing and provisioning capabilities will enable order of magnitude improvements in client management efficiency.
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Mobile
The Wall Street Journal, 7/1/03: SBC, Barnes & Noble Will Test 'Hot Spots' for Wi-Fi Technology
By ALMAR LATOUR and JESSE DRUCKER
The commercial rollout of wireless high-speed Web access known as Wi-Fi is picking up steam, as two more major companies soon will offer so-called hot spots, public locations where customers can pick up broadband signals.
SBC Communications Inc. is expected to install 2,000 hot spots in hotels, airports and other high-traffic areas, primarily in its 13-state region that includes Texas and California, by the end of next year, people familiar with the situation say. The company is expected to announce the initiative this month and will begin deploying the hot spots by October. The rollout would be among the biggest so far.
Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble Inc. said it plans to test Wi-Fi access in two dozen stores in the Atlanta and Seattle areas this summer. Pricing hasn't been determined and likely will be left to whichever telecommunications providers wind up with the New York book retailer as a partner.
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Microsoft
InternetNews.Com, 6/30/03: Exchange 2003 Released to Manufacturing
By Thor Olavsrud
On the heels of its release candidate of Exchange Server 2003 earlier this month, Microsoft Monday released the integrated collaboration environment to manufacturing, signaling that it will soon be generally available.
The company said customers can now order a 120-day evaluation kit and sign up for an Outlook Web Access demonstration account. The product, formerly code-named "Titanium," is scheduled to be made available to volume-licensing customers this summer and to become generally available this fall.
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InternetNews.Com, 6/30/03: Curtains for Windows NT 4.0 Support
By Thor Olavsrud
The Windows NT 4.0 Workstation operating system has reached the end of its line. Monday marks the last day on the seven-year-old operating system's support life-cycle, meaning Microsoft (Quote, Company Info) will pull the plug on telephone support as of Tuesday.
Customers will still be able to turn to self-help online, but a help-desk will no longer be accessible and the company will not patch the operating system if new bugs or security issues surface.
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Trends
Release 1.0, 7/03: RFID: Logistics Meets Identity
On the one hand, this issue of Release 1.0 is about the next hot new, new thing: RFID, or radio-frequency identification, an existing technology based on two primary components (ID tags and over the-air scanners). They are getting cheap and functional enough that new, critical-mass applications are emerging in supply chain and retail environments (to say nothing of “homeland security”). A hot new market, it’s already crawling with an array of mostly indistinguishable start-ups promising cheaper chips, faster readers and the like. Better yet, there’s the scent of real ROI: more accurate tracking of goods leading to fewer errors, lower inventories and even better-stocked shelves, which lead in turn to lower costs, satisfied customers and higher revenues. (The dogs will never eat the dog food if they can’t find it on the shelf.) One problem: While the ROIs seem obvious and while RFID makes the “after” case clear, the “before” case, i.e. error rates and inefficiencies and their financial impact, can be hard to quantify precisely because the close monitoring RFID will provide isn’t available in the “before” case. Making such things visible – and correcting them – is the fundamental commercial potential of RFID, broadly drawn.
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