Outsourcing
Gartner, 10/13/04: A Framework for Understanding Contact Center Services
This research provides a framework to assist business planners and executives in defining and selecting their contact center hosted and outsourced service options.
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CIO Magazine, 10/15/04: How to Outsource-Proof Your IT Department
A NEW GAME PLAN
CEOs increasingly believe that sending IT work offshore will magically reduce costs and increase productivity. To combat this outsourcery, CIOs need a little white magic of their own.
BY CHRISTOPHER KOCH
…
A single point of clarity has emerged from the furor over offshore outsourcing: Certain types of knowledge work will migrate to areas with lower labor costs as inexorably as certain types of manufacturing moved overseas in the '70s and '80s. The economics are inarguable. With the Internet, cheap telecom, well-educated workforces that speak English and costs of living as little as one-tenth compared to those in the West, many countries are equipped to do knowledge work for much less money and, arguably, the same level of quality as the West. Over 104,000 IT jobs moved offshore between 2000 and 2003, according to the Information Technology Association of America, and nothing suggests that the trend is going to change or even slow.
But there are a few catches. The outsourcer's economic advantage is fragile and liable to fracture if the knowledge work being sent offshore doesn't have the same character as the manufacturing work that went before it—that is, clearly defined, repeatable jobs that do not require collaboration or transcontinental oversight, and are easily measured and verified for productivity and quality. "The majority of successful offshore work is still the airtight project that doesn't require collaboration," says Meta's Lepeak.
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Support
Gartner, 10/11/04: Hardware Vendors Lead Infrastructure Support Providers
HP and IBM lead in revenue among the world's top providers of infrastructure support services. Gartner Dataquest has released the final market share figures for vendors that provide hardware maintenance and support services and software support services.
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Security
The Wall Street Journal, 10/18/04: New Tools Are Targeting Spyware and Adware
By DON CLARK
Spyware and adware are notoriously hard to keep off of personal computers. But companies are getting some new countermeasures.
Blue Coat Systems Inc., a Silicon Valley company that makes devices called proxy servers, today is enhancing them with software for blocking spyware and adware programs at the edge of corporate networks. Its executives estimate the product can stop 98% of such unwanted programs from being installed.
Webroot Software Inc. boasts a similar success rate with its products, which are installed directly on personal computers. In June, it introduced a corporate version -- which allows managers to remotely install and update programs on PCs -- and says it has already sold 250,000 copies of the product.
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