Outsourcing
Infoworld, 12/11/03: Offshore outsourcing: Little effect on US jobs?
Some argue the shift has little impact
By Grant Gross
The trend toward U.S. IT and manufacturing companies outsourcing jobs to other countries has so far had little effect on the overall U.S. job market, supporters of offshore outsourcing and some economists argued Thursday, but others predicted the national debate over the issue will get hotter as more jobs move.
With most estimates saying 500,000 or fewer U.S. jobs have moved offshore to countries like India, offshore outsourcing has had little impact on the U.S. unemployment rate, which stood at 5.9 percent in November, said defenders of the practice during a forum, sponsored by the Information Policy Institute, in Washington, D.C. Instead, a more complex series of problems is causing the current "jobless" economic recovery, with the U.S. economy failing to create new jobs over the past two years, said Erica Groshen, assistant vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
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Giga, 12/4/03: IT Trends 2004: Client Systems Management
David Friedlander
What are the current key drivers and trends in the client systems management market?
The client systems management (CSM) market continues to shift toward bundled tool suites. Vendors are continually adding functionality, frequently by partnering with or acquiring other vendors. Security functions such as patch management are also quickly becoming an important part of the CSM market.
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Giga, 12/9/03: IT Trends 2004: Managed Messaging
William Martorelli
What are the current trends in managed messaging?
Managed messaging last made headlines during the initial rush of hosted solutions (e.g., ASP, MSP) during the late 1990s. With platform evolution accelerating, interest and activity in managed messaging, including both hosted and on-site managed options, are once again on the rise.
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Gartner, 12/9/03: Midsize Banks Seek Answers About Outsourcing
Abstract: With 50 percent of midsize banks using managed security services and 10 percent using offshore outsourcing, CIOs are raising questions about outsourcing.
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Giga, 12/4/03: IT Trends 2004: IT Asset Management
David Friedlander
What are the current trends and drivers in the IT asset management market?
The IT asset management (ITAM) market has recovered from a downturn during the past two years. However, companies have continued to focus on specific pain points or projects such as lease management or software compliance. Expect to see some growth in larger enterprise ITAM projects during the next two years as executives come under increasing pressure to comply with financial and other regulations.
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Helpdesk
Giga, 12/9/03: Approaches for Automatically Creating Incidents From Customer E-Mails
John Ragsdale
How can I automatically create an incident/case/trouble ticket in my CRM, help desk or customer service application for inbound customer e-mails?
Creating a record for each customer e-mail is critical to ensure the question or issue is captured and responded to, but also to include in customer history to represent the full picture of customer interactions. Email response management systems (ERMS) are making the processing of e-mail much easier, but even without an ERMS, support software has been logging e-mails successfully for many years. The word for this is instantiation: how is an incoming customer e-mail instantiated, or physically represented, in the trouble ticketing system. There are two pieces to this: how to automatically create a record in the service software from an inbound e-mail, and what record is created. The second part, what record is created, is an area of product differentiation for some vendors.
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SMB
Gartner, 12/4/03: Focused Channels Lead to the Elusive SMB Market
IT vendors need indirect sales channels, such as those offered by value-added resellers, to reach small and midsize businesses. The focus and dedication required to succeed is often taken for granted.
Too many IT vendors are investing millions of dollars in pursuing the small and midsize business (SMB) market (directly and indirectly), but getting too little for their effort. The two biggest mistakes that these vendors make is assuming that the SMB market is homogeneous and that the market can be won strictly through new products and feature function sets. Success comes only from properly segmenting the SMB market, followed by deliberate and sustained efforts with multiple, quality channel partners — including value-added resellers (VARs), systems integrators and small independent software vendors (ISVs).
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IT Management
Gartner, 12/9/03: Measuring the Performance of the MSB IS Organization
Establishing performance metrics is critical for all IS organizations, and can be particularly challenging for
midsize businesses.
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Security
Computerworld, 12/11/03: Using tools to set up and comply with a systems security policy
Opinion by Fred Pinkett, Pedestal Software
Information security is a reactive world. The next intrusion, vulnerability or worm is always right around the corner. With critical issues arising everywhere, the typical chief information security officer and IT security organization spend most of their time reacting to outside forces rather than getting ahead of the curve.
One way out of this predicament is to establish a systems security policy and a method of ensuring compliance. Systems security policy management tools are growing in popularity. These tools automate the process of viewing and setting the configurations of a large number of systems and reporting on their configurations against a security policy to give measurable results. Improperly configured systems, including items such as permissions, user rights and operating system security parameters, cause most common security problems.
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Giga, 12/4/03: Antispam Services Are Easy to Deploy but Expensive
Jan Sundgren
What are the pros and cons of antispam services?
Like appliances that offer antispam capabilities (see IdeaByte, Appliances That Fight Spam, Jan Sundgren), antispam services such as those from Postini (www.postini.com), MessageLabs (www.messagelabs.com), Frontbridge (www.frontbridge.com), MX Logic (www.mxlogic.com) and Syntegra (www.syntegra.com) are seeing a fair amount of traction. These services offer easy deployment and administration, but they also raise issues of flexibility, availability and cost that are not as clear cut as some believe.
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Microsoft
Infoworld, 12/11/03: Microsoft readies Windows XP Service Pack 2 beta
New security features included
By Joris Evers
Microsoft Corp. is gearing up for the first beta test of a set of updates for Windows XP designed to bolster the operating system's security and add features such as support for version 1.1 of Bluetooth and a new wireless LAN client.
The beta of Windows XP Service Pack 2, or SP2, will be made available via Microsoft's Developer Network to several hundred thousand testers before the end of the year, Matt Pilla, senior product manager for Windows at Microsoft said Thursday. Targeted testers are software developers and IT professionals, he said.
"SP2 is a fundamentally different service pack," Pilla said. "Much of what we are delivering is the typical set of updates and roll ups, but we are doing a lot more to make the operating system more resilient to attacks."
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