The IT outsourcing industry in 2011 was largely marked by smaller deals, hesitant customers, profit-squeezed providers and a whole lot of talk—but not as much action—on the cloud computing front.

New Year's Eve brings Monte Ford a bittersweet resolution.

Fernando GonzalezFavorite pastime: Watching my grandchildren grow. Something interesting that most people don't know about you: My love of the arts, primarily painting. I can draw very well, [but] I can't put life to what I draw. In high school, I was... a bookworm. One of my nicknames in school was "Professor." Last book you read:John Adams by David McCullough. Role model: Victor E. Villaseor, who wrote Rain of Gold . He writes a book every 10 years, and the fact that you can dedicate yourself to this one thing for 10 years -- that's dedication.

The world of new Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker is lot more complicated than the one imagined by his predecessors.

No year in the IT industry would be complete without a number of high-profile ERP (enterprise resource planning) project failures, ones that burn through mountains of cash, bring company operations to a standstill, generate bad publicity for vendors and toss careers in the trash.

In what could be an important decision for the IT outsourcing industry and its customers, a London court recently ruled that EDS (now part of Hewlett-Packard) must pay damages to a former outsourcing customer for failing to live up to its sales pitch.