CenterBeam
Computerworld, 12/15/03: Outsourcing Support an Option, Too
Story by Patrick Thibodeau
Some users say the best way to reduce costs may be to outsource their desktop support to near-shore or offshore providers.
Last spring, Curtis Helsel, vice president of data and technology management at the University of Colorado Foundation, was facing a 30% budget cutback for his Boulder-based organization.
The foundation laid off 55 people, including 12 help desk and network administrators in Helsel's IT department. It was part of a plan to outsource much of the organization's IT infrastructure to San Jose-based CenterBeam Inc.
CenterBeam uses a near-shore facility in Saint John, New Brunswick, to manage PCs, servers, firewalls and backups and to handle patch management. Local Boulder contractors hired through CenterBeam take care of physical hardware problems, but for everything else, users turn to the help desk for support.
Helsel estimates savings to the foundation of about 35% to 40%, most of it in salary costs.
Returning to in-house support "would be extremely expensive for us," he said. "There is a real sense that we are locked into this for the long term."
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Microsoft
Computerworld, 12/12/03: Microsoft readies Windows XP Service Pack 2 beta
It will be available to several hundred thousand testers by year's end
Story 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 yesterday. Targeted testers are software developers and IT professionals, he said.
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