Sourcing

Cloud Computing is coming to your neighbourhood, and market competition soon will demand that you give it attention, because its likely rapid growth will bring large benefits for enterprises.

Once upon a time, IT service providers demanded exclusivity from customers. As those early outsourcing deals wore on, clients grew weary of being locked in to a "one and only" provider. To keep their customers happy, outsourcing vendors began offering minimum volume and revenue commitment clauses, which gave customers some room to breathe while insuring a certain level of return for IT service suppliers.

Nortel Networks has set up a Global Network Operations Center (GNOC) in Bangalore, to help remotely manage and support the networks of its carrier and enterprise customers in Asia, Europe, North and South America.

Chinese outsourcer Neusoft is pushing to expand in Europe and the U.S. ahead of an upswing in outsourcing the firm expects after the global recession.

SLAs are a critical component of any vendor contract. Beyond listing expectations of service type and quality, an SLA provides remedies when requirements aren't met.

Anxious about your staffing responsibilities? Questions answered here.

Vendors tout the software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model as an easy way to deploy applications. But is SaaS all itÂ’s cracked up to be?

Social networking outlets such as MySpace and Facebook are offering new avenues of communication for corporations and governments, but are also presenting fresh challenges to CIOs deciding how best to fit them into their business processes. Dave Nikolejsin, CIO for the Government of British Columbia, discusses his own experiences thus far in the world of Web 2.0.

Meyer (Sandy) Frucher, CEO of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX), loves a good story. He tells them easily, like one might tell a friend or spouse about the day at work. Even when he's pressed for time, he weaves a juicy plot and leaves listeners begging for the conclusion. With this in mind, it seems only natural that Frucher relies on an anecdote to explain the importance of IT in his organization.

How does the recruiting industry work?

Choosing a successor is not about cloning yourself. It's about identifying the business values that are important to you and picking someone who shares them so that there can be continuity for both your customers and your employees.

There are two hot topics in the U.S. offshore outsourcing industry today-first, what the likely impact of the recession will be and second, what will be the likely impact of Barak Obama's presidency. While the former has attracted some good intellectual debate, with sound arguments and evidence to support both sides of the story, the latter has received pretty naive coverage, mostly from senior executives of offshore outsourcing or advisory firms desperate to allay their customer's concerns. One fundamental question that they fail to address is why Obama should care about offshore outsourcing. If it was so simple and so straightforward that offshore outsourcing is good for corporations, good for countries, good for economies, then why would Obama even consider doing anything about it?

Globalization is suffering from economic, financial and political challenges. IT organizations can improve results and mitigate risks by revamping offshore strategies. Implementing globalization no longer creates automatic competitive cost advantage. While nearly all companies have globalization programs, most were created randomly and reactively without strategic consideration. To gain competitive advantage, companies must strategically engineer the integration and synergy from service providers.

Have you ever heard the expression 'Any road will take you there if you don't know where you're going'? When it comes to outsourcing, it can sure cause long term problems if you don't invest in strategy development, goal setting and planning.

As the US economy continues its downward spiral, analysts who predicted lost jobs would cause a surge in outsourcing are eating their words.