CenterBeam
Saint John Telegraph Journal, 4/1/04: City getting 300 new jobs
Tech-support positions at Centerbeam will pay between $30,000 and $50,000
BY NINA CHIARELLI
Centerbeam, a world leader in information technology outsourcing, is opening a 300-person technical support office in Saint John.
Trevor Holder, Conservative MLA for Saint John Portland, will announce Centerbeam's move to uptown Saint John this morning.
"It's big news for two reasons. First of all, there's the commitment to the uptown area and the revitalization of our city centre. And it is really is a Cadillac customer contact centre," he said.
Centerbeam is a California company that partners with other organizations to deliver strategies for managing basic technology infrastructure. Its employees provide tech support and secure information assets for other companies, while providing back-up services and around-the-clock support.
Over the next three years, the company will hire 300 people to provide high-expertise, trouble-shooting for technical support.
At $30,000 to $50,000 a year, these aren't your average customer contact jobs, Mr. Holder said.
He said the employees would most likely be university graduates with either science or information technology degrees.
The province will provide the company with a $1.7-million, three-year loan guarantee, which comes to about $6,000 per job.
"This is all part of Saint John's modernization. Certainly, we have a manufacturing sector that's very important to us, but by the same token we want to capture and grab hold of the new economy, the information technology sector," he said.
"We have the talent in Saint John, we have the people in Saint John, and we're very happy that they chose New Brunswick to set up their business."
The company will locate its offices at the corner of King and Prince William Streets.
Tony Hardt will head up the Saint John operation.
[story here]
Outsourcing
Forrestor, 1/24/04: Penalties for Failure to Achieve Outsourced Help Desk SLAs
Robert McNeill and Julie Giera
Question
We are planning to outsource off-site a first-level help desk support contract with one of our vendors. What are reasonable penalties to cover any failures to meet service levels?
Answer
Reasonable penalties for missing a service-level agreement (SLA) most often include the refund of a percentage of the monthly fee. However, customers should not stop there. Companies should tier those refunds or penalties according to the severity of the missed SLA. For instance, failure to hit an individual SLA in one month might result in a 3 percent refund of that month’s fee, while failure to hit the next consecutive month should cause an escalation of the penalty to a 7 percent refund. If the SLAs are missed for a third consecutive month, not only would the refund be higher (15 percent, for example) but this should also result in other remedial action — perhaps escalation to the outsourcer’s executive team.
[more]
ZDNet, 3/31/04: For Dell, Indian call center failure a lesson
By Andy McCue
Dell admits it has "learned its lesson" after being forced to drop its Indian call center last year following customer complaints about the quality of service.
The call center operation for the OptiPlex desktops and Latitude laptops was moved back to the United States. Dell CIO Randy Mott said in an interview that the Bangalore center was unable to deal satisfactorily with the volume of calls generated by the rapid growth of those product lines.
"In that example we were not as efficient as we wanted to be," he said. "We were growing very quickly in that (consumer) segment. It got a little ahead of us. We took the decision to get it back under control. Our customers expect more from Dell than other companies, and we weren't meeting those (expectations)."
[more]
The Wall Street Journal, 4/1/04: Outsourcing to India Sees a Twist
By JAY SOLOMON and ELENA CHERNEY
Indian technology and call-center companies are setting up operations in North America, driven by a desire to be closer to top clients and by political pressure over the outsourcing of U.S. jobs.
Major Indian companies such as Infosys Technologies Ltd. and Wipro Ltd. have made a push into the U.S. and Canada in the past year. Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest software company, now has 47 work sites in the U.S. to serve customers that include American Express Co., Citigroup Inc., ChevronTexaco Corp. and Eli Lilly & Co. Yet corporate India's Western shift is little noticed as outsourcing of skilled work from the U.S. to India and other countries has become a big issue in the U.S. presidential race.
[more]
Forrestor, 1/19/04: Opportunities and Challenges in the Offshore Technical Help Desk
William Martorelli and John Ragsdale
Giga Position
The recent decision by Dell to transfer support for its OptiPlex desktops and Latitude notebook computers for corporate customers from Bangalore back to the United States and Lehman Brothers’ similar decision to transfer offshore technical help desk services back in-house underscore the challenge of offering technical help desk services from offshore locations, in both cases, India. However, despite this setback, the use of offshore technical support is growing, as is strategic outsourcing. India leads the charge here, just as it does in application development and maintenance. Indian suppliers are pursuing help desk opportunities as part of their drive into IT infrastructure management, while major global outsourcers seek to increase the use of lowcost labor for a variety of tasks, including help desk services to reduce their cost bases. Regardless of the approach, customers must exercise significant care outsourcing technical help desks to India and elsewhere and closely monitor customer satisfaction and interaction quality to identify and correct problems quickly.
[more]
Gartner, 1/8/04: Apply Outsourcing Lessons to Shared-Service Delivery
Many "federated style" enterprises are adopting a shared-service approach, using common resource pools to deliver business process services. These enterprises can learn much from the experience of outsourcing IT services.
Introduction
Government agencies and conglomerate-based enterprises are adopting a shared-service approach to delivering IT and business process services. Gartner's research on internal service companies (ISCos) is strongly applicable to shared IT services. Here, we focus on how to implement shared business process services by leveraging key lessons learned from IT outsourcing. Shared-service centers typically deliver common/back-office-type processes such as financial, human resources and payroll transactions, seeking to leverage economies of scale across a federated-style enterprise.
[more]
IT Management
Gartner, 1/20/04: The Need For IT Governance: Now More Than Ever
In an era of cost constraints, market turbulence and organizational stress, the role of IT governance has never been more critical. 2003 was a turbulent, uncertain year for IT managers and executives worldwide. The depressed business climate exerted enormous pressure on CIOs and their management teams to minimize spending, outsource to cut costs, extend asset lives and reduce head count. At the same time, they were expected to execute IT investments that enhance security and reliability while driving enterprise efficiency and effectiveness. Now, more than ever, the CIO must ensure that an effective, well-conceived IT governance mechanism is in place to provide coherent, disciplined oversight of IT investment decisions. The need for IT governance will be even more important in 2004, as the economy begins to recover and pressure builds for new investments and initiatives, as well as for heightened service levels driven by increased business activity.
[more]
Security
C|net, 3/31/04: As spring arrives, virus spreads seeds far and wide
By Dawn Kawamoto
NetSky variants accounted for 60 percent of all viruses reported in March, making it the most prolific worm in the month, according to a report released Wednesday by security software vendor Sophos.
Fifteen versions of NetSky infected computers during March--sometimes two different variants appearing in a single day. And on Wednesday, yet another NetSky variant was discovered, NetSky.R, the second variant to appear this week. Antivirus experts attribute the frequency of the NetSky and Bagle viruses to competition between the virus writers.
[more]
Forrestor, 3/29/04: Patch Management Products Proliferate, But Absorption In Larger Solutions Is Likely
by Jan Sundgren
with Steve Hunt and Natalie Lambert
The challenge of patching software vulnerabilities has spawned a market for products that support a systematic patch management process. In the wake of vulnerability exploits like Slammer and Blaster, organizations are urgently looking for products that facilitate each stage of the patching process, from tracking and evaluating new vulnerabilities to documenting and monitoring applied patches. Responding to this demand, a variety of vendors have developed patch management products. These vendors include specialized players and players in related markets, such as systems management and vulnerability remediation. While the products are maturing quickly, substantial differences remain, and customers should evaluate products carefully. The long run will likely bring not only mature products but also the gradual shrinkage of a distinct patch management market. Point products may survive as a niche market, but most of the functionality of these products will be absorbed, on the one hand, by bigger products offering comprehensive systems and/or vulnerability management, and on the other hand, by platform vendors looking to shore up their security.
[more]
C|net, 3/31/04: Gates reports on security progress
By David Becker
Microsoft has made significant progress in making its software more secure, and further improvements are on the way, Chairman Bill Gates assured customers in a letter Wednesday.
"Given human nature, evolving threat models and the increasing interconnectedness of computers, the number of security exploits will never reach zero," Gates wrote in a Microsoft Progress Report, the latest in a periodic series of letters on major technology issues e-mailed to Microsoft customers. "But we can dramatically blunt the impact of cybercriminals and are dedicating a major portion of our R&D investments to security advances."
[more]
[Gates’ email here]
Microsoft
eWeek, 3/31/04: Microsoft, Others Publish Metadata-Exchange Standard
By Darryl K. Taft
Microsoft Corp., IBM and friends introduced a new Web services standard and enhanced another, extending the tandem's might in the Web services standardization arena while raising caution for some in the space.
Microsoft, IBM, BEA Systems Inc. and SAP AG on Tuesday announced the publication of the WS-MetadataExchange specification. In addition, Microsoft, IBM and BEA announced an update to the existing WS-Addressing specification. Both specifications are part of an existing Web services architecture laid out by Microsoft.
[more]
Collaborative Technologies
The New York Times, 4/1/04: Blog-Bleary? Try (What Else?) a Blog
By DAVID F. GALLAGHER
MY pointing readers to the Web's newest and best bits, Web logs offer a way to cut through online clutter. But now that there are millions of blogs, what was once a solution to the information glut has started to become part of the problem. So perhaps inevitably, sites and services have popped up that add another level to the information food chain by digesting the Web digests.
The latest such site, Kinja, is scheduled to open to the public today at www.kinja.com. The site automatically compiles digests of blogs covering subject areas like politics and baseball. Short excerpts from the blogs are included, with links to the complete entries on the individual blog sites. After signing up for a free account with Kinja, users can enter the addresses of their favorite blogs and generate a digest - a customized blog of blogs.
[more]
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