Outsourcing
Forrestor, 3/18/04: Organic Business
by Ted Schadler
with Charles Rutstein and Carey E. Schwaber
Organic IT — technology infrastructure that adapts to the on-demand needs of business — will help firms slash their IT costs. But the real payoff will come when firms harness their technology horsepower and new Internet standards to bring their business services online in a strategy that Forrester calls Organic Business. An Organic Business will embed its business services in customers’ and suppliers’ operations under direct business control. The result? Sticky customers, efficient suppliers, and the rise of a business services Internet that overcomes location barriers to enable deeper business process outsourcing.
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Gartner, 3/19/04: Remote IT Management: North American Pricing and Margin Trends
Utility computing and the IT utility concept represents a fundamental shift in enterprise architecture and IT services delivery. At the very heart of IT utility is management services. R&D investments revolve around cost-effective management of IT availability and performance, as well as enabling automated or IT-enabled business services. The result has been a rush to market by vendors to create remote monitoring and management (RMM) platforms to offer remote management capabilities and service bundles.
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Forrestor, 3/23/04: Client School: The Key To Successful IT Outsourcing Engagements
A large number of outsourced IT projects or outsourcing relationships fail or do not meet client expectations. Certainly, IT service vendors are to blame for many of these failures, but a client that allows its external services vendor to fail must accept some of the blame. The majority of IT service failures can be avoided if companies could learn how to properly engage and manage their consulting and outsourcing partners. Given the growth of outsourcing, the future of IT management will focus on managing service delivery contracts, not managing internal programmers.
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Offshouring
Forrestor, 3/24/04: Understanding The IT Services Vendors’ Offshore Approaches
US-based IT services vendors, such as EDS, IBM, and Accenture, are growing their Indian facilities to accommodate the rabid demand for Indian IT services and to compete with the India-based vendors. While the US-based vendors are fully capable of supporting clients from their Indian facilities and have invested millions improving this capability, their approach to and motivation for offshore outsourcing is significantly different than that of India-based vendors. US-based vendors view their Indian offering as a secondary or tertiary component of their core lines of business and, thus, do not seek to fully exploit the Indian outsourcing potential. Clients that want to fully exploit India’s outsourcing potential should rely on India-based vendors first and US-based vendors only after they prove that they can and will support any type of IT project and not just parts of low-level, nonstrategic projects.
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Disaster Recovery
Gartner, 3/17/04: Management Update: Best Practices in Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
In this tough economic environment, it is tempting to cut resources in business continuity management (BCM). Many enterprises mistakenly view BCM as an insurance policy against which they will never need to place a claim.
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Security
Forrestor, 3/18/04: Protecting Your WLAN From Imposters
Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) does not offer any significant authentication, so it’s not actually possible to know if an access point or a user is legitimate. Clients should deploy a form of IEEE 802.1x authentication with encryption extensions designed to keep such information private. While the highest level of security is available using Extensible Authentication Protocol-Trusted Layer Security (EAPTLS), the requirement for digital certificates for both servers and users makes it prohibitively expensive. Protected EAP (PEAP) is likely to prevail as the method of choice as it is supported by both Cisco and Microsoft, although currently its support is mostly limited to Windows platforms. Clients in a non-Cisco-centric environment that require solid security but also support for non-Windows environments should look at Tunneled Transport Layer Security (TTLS).
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SME
Forrestor, 3/24/04: Building Smart Resource Allocation: Small Vendors Chisel Away At Building The Fabric Operating System
Software that dynamically manages componentized apps and optimizes the allocation of their hardware resources is still in its infancy. But small vendors like Enigmatec, Sychron, and VIEO are building tools that provide closed-loop automation and powerful policy execution capabilities. They’re working on one of the last pieces in the software puzzle of what Forrester calls the fabric operating system.
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Microsoft
Gartner, 2/4/04: MBS Consulting Provides Resource for Implementation Partners
Microsoft executives explain the mission and go-to-market strategy of Microsoft Business Solutions Professional Services. Challenges certainly lie ahead as Microsoft strives to service larger clients.
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Hewlett Packard
Business Week, 3/23/04: HP Joins the Small-Biz Gold Rush
Entrepreneurs are ready to make better use of IT, says the tech giant's John Brennan, who explains HP's push into the market
When it comes to reaping the benefits of the tech revolution, entrepreneurs and small-business owners could be forgiven for harboring the suspicion that their needs and priorities have long been pushed to the back of the line. Yes, it's relatively easy to set up a Web site, and there is no shortage of software to take some of the pain out payroll, taxes, and inventory. But after that? Well, the pickings have been pretty slim.
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Bigger Picture
Gartner, 2/25/04: Where to Invest and What to Avoid in Software and Services
Software markets and the IT service market will undergo major transformations in the next two years. For investors, the big trends shaping markets matter more than the prowess of individual vendors.
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