Outsourcing
Business Week, 6/9/04: India's Outsourcers Turn West
By Manjeet Kripalani
Aiming to expand their reach and customer base, they're buying U.S. and European companies -- often hiring more workers there
In recent years, Western companies have rushed to India, outsourcing their back-office operations, call centers, and software development -- or in some cases flat-out acquiring Indian outfits that do such work. Now it's turnabout time. In the past two years, Indian businesses have snapped up a dozen U.S. call centers and business-processing companies. "Indian companies are looking to build a global model quickly," says Kanarath P. Balaraj, partner with WestBridge Capital Partners, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that invests in outsourcing companies.
Why the reverse migration? As India's outsourcing sector matures, companies there need to increase their industry expertise, geographic reach, and, most of all, their customer base. That's where takeovers of U.S. concerns come in. Indecomm Global Services, a health-care and financial-services outsourcer based in Bangalore, recently paid $5 million for Simpata Group, based in San Francisco. Simpata manages human-resources software for clients such as health-care provider Anthem and some Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurers.
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IT Management
C|net, 6/9/04: IT morale drops to all-time low
Morale among IT workers has dipped to an all-time low, even though demand for certain skills is rising, according to a new study from Meta Group.
Seventy-two percent of the 650 organizations contacted by the research company said the continuing lack of job growth in the industry is dampening the spirits of IT staff. More than half of the companies said they lost staff this year.
Some of the companies are paying attention to retaining key performers, because doing so is less expensive than replacing staff. But the combination of fewer employees, fewer dollars for projects, and the perception that there is no need to focus on retention will not help productivity, the research company said.
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Security
C|net, 6/9/04: Pop-up toolbar spreads via IE flaws
By Robert Lemos
update An adware purveyor has apparently used two previously unknown security flaws in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to install a toolbar on victims' computers that triggers pop-up ads, researchers said this week.
One flaw lets an attacker run a program on a victim's machine, while the other enables malicious code to "cross zones," or run with privileges higher than normal. Together, the two issues allow for the creation of a Web site that, when visited by victims, can upload and install programs to the victim's computer, according to two analyses of the security holes.
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Internetnews.com, 6/9/04: Humans Still Weakest Security Link
By Roy Mark
WASHINGTON -- Recognizing that humans are the weakest link in any security chain is a staple of any IT security gathering, and the issue is as relevant today as ever, a Gartner analyst said Tuesday afternoon at the research firm's 10th Annual IT Security Summit.
In fact, according to Rich Mogull, Gartner's director of information security, social engineering -- hacker-speak for compromising security systems by human manipulation rather than technology - is currently "epidemic," and the enterprise is vulnerable to surprisingly simple tricks and ruses as never before.
"Social engineering is so powerful it can completely circumvent all of your security if done right," Mogull said.
Criminal hackers, for instance, know it is often easier to pick up the telephone, pose as someone in the security department and ask an employee for their password. Mogull says it happens more times than companies are willing to admit. Even simpler, and just as common as ever, is a visitor walking through a company and collecting passwords written on Post-Its.
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Computerworld, 6/9/04: For sale by public auction: Juicy laptop secrets
Many lost or stolen laptops contain sensitive data that can be easily retrieved
News Story by Bernhard Warner
Laptops containing sensitive financial details and all manner of corporate secrets can be snapped up at auctions for a pittance, a security firm said today.
Stockholm-based Pointsec Mobile Technologies said it bought 100 laptop computers from a host of Internet and public auctions over the past two months. The exercise was designed to show that the scores of lost or stolen laptops that wind up at auction every day have hard drives with little or no security -- giving identity thieves and fraudsters easy access to lucrative data.
What Pointsec did not expect to find was a cache of corporate laptops that were as easy to crack as grandma's PC. But the firm's technicians were able to pull sensitive details from 70 of the 100 machines it bought.
In one case, it obtained a particularly vulnerable hard drive from online auction site eBay that apparently once belonged to one of Europe's largest insurance companies.
On the hard drive were current details of customers' pension plans, payroll records, personnel details, log-in codes and administration passwords for the company's intranet. Home addresses, telephone numbers and dates of birth of customers were also listed in 77 Microsoft Excel files, the company said.
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Hewlett Packard
Computerworld, 6/9/04: Profitability elusive for HP software group
The division hopes to 'approach' break-even by late 2005
News Story by Robert McMillan
Business may be picking up for Hewlett-Packard Co.'s hardware divisions, but the company's software group is still more than a year from profitability, HP executives said yesterday during a financial analyst conference in San Jose.
"The return to profitability in that business is later than I had originally said, and we had originally thought a year ago," said Carly Fiorina, HP's chairman and CEO, during a webcast of the meeting.
In the company's most recent quarter, software was one of the fastest-growing divisions within HP, with revenue rising 23% year over year, but the business unit as a whole was unprofitable. That trend is expected to continue for at least another year, according to HP.
"Our plan is to approach break-even by the end of 2005," said Ann Livermore, the executive vice president of HP's Technology Solutions Group.
One of the reasons behind the division's lack of profitability is that HP has spent $100 million in research and development over the past year, along with millions more in the acquisition of six software companies, including TruLogica Inc., Consera Software and Novadigm Inc., Fiorina said.
That trend is expected to continue over the next year as HP works to promote its vision of a flexible computing architecture called the Adaptive Enterprise, Fiorina said.
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Optimism
Computerworld, 6/9/04: IDC: PC sales rising faster than expected
Desktop PCs still account for over 70% of PC shipments globally
News Story by Tom Krazit
While notebook PCs have received all the attention over the past few quarters, desktops aren't dead yet. Faster-than-expected growth of desktops is expected to lift the overall market more than previously thought, according to updated data released by research firm IDC today.
Worldwide shipments of PCs are now expected to increase 13.5% for 2004, up from expectations of 11.4% growth released by IDC in March.
In the first quarter, desktop shipments increased 13.4% compared with the first quarter of 2003. The category grew only 9.4% in the fourth quarter of 2003, compared with the fourth quarter of 2002. The fourth quarter is considered the strongest period for PC shipments, while the first quarter is historically much slower.
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