• The inside story of why Puma dumped four Cloud vendors for one

  By Kim S. Nash | 01 December, 2011 05:47

  Cloud's ability to ratchet server power and storage up and down as needed suits the demands of online marketing campaigns that tend to gear up and wind down quickly. So a few years ago, sneaker manufacturer Puma ran fast toward adoption.

• Editor's Letter: Make Your Vendors Work For You

  By Maryfran Johnson | 01 December, 2011 05:00

  What have your vendors done for you lately?

• CIO Summit Roundtable: Application specific SLAs for the enterprise

  By Georgina Swan | 12 October, 2011 11:06

  Some enterprises have centralised, moved consolidated global ICT assets without giving much thought to the performance of their business applications. While consolidation can help to lower costs, users can have very different experiences for accessing data and applications based on the physical distance to the data centre, where latency may be an issue.

• Vendors as partners

  By John Dix | 22 August, 2011 20:39

  Ken Piddington, CIO of Global Partners LP, an $8 billion energy company in the Northeast, recently implemented an innovative vendor partnership program that he hopes will improve the product and services the company gets from suppliers while helping those suppliers more efficiently serve the company and benefit from the relationship.

• Inside the next generation vendor management office

  By Patrick M. Connaughton | 29 March, 2011 03:59

  Today, almost 50 per cent of companies have a centralized vendor management group in place, with 11 per cent planning to introduce one this year. Why are we seeing the growth of this unit within the organization? The main drivers for a business to invest in a VMO are to get more value out of existing suppliers and to lower overall costs through better rate negotiations and demand consolidation. Most often, the VMO is either housed in IT or procurement, depending on the business, and consists of two to ten people who are responsible for overseeing the big picture of vendor management.

• The six million dollar vendor

  By James Hutchinson | 14 July, 2011 07:00

  Between 2005 and 2010, Gartner estimated IT managers and executive decision makers have gone from dealing with an average of 3.7 vendors to 10. The onset of Cloud computing as well as the revival of service outsourcing in wake of the economic downturn have only exacerbated this as companies increasingly look to multi-source their services to obtain the functionality they need at a cost they can afford.

• Managing relationships with vendors - Part 3

  By David Binning | 06 May, 2011 15:09

  For some organisations the hassle and uncertainty that can arise from multiple vendor relationships is best addressed by putting all of their eggs into the one carefully chosen basket. South Australian transport and logistics company, Northline, recently entered into a five year, $5 million contract with integrator Brennan, which will handle more than 300 portable and desktop computers in addition to servers, enterprise software and LAN communications. Basically, everything except telecommunications, which is provided by Optus.

• Managing relationships with vendors - Part 2

  By David Binning | 05 May, 2011 13:07

  According to Dr Tim O’Neill, co-founder and director of business intelligence specialists Avolution, probably the biggest mistake an organisation can make when dealing with suppliers is to outsource the systems architecture. “This is why there’s so many untold billions of dollars-worth of failed IT projects out there,” he says. “Outsourcing the architecture function is fraught with danger.” In order for projects to be successful organisations need to maintain a healthy degree of cynicism and effectively force vendors to earn trust.

• Managing relationships with vendors

  By David Binning | 04 May, 2011 16:03

  The IT choices a company makes can mean the difference between business success and failure. Whether it’s access to information, communications between staff, partners and customers, HR, inventory management, operation and monitoring of equipment and other and assets as well as business security, IT has managed to make itself indispensible at virtually every organisational level. Yet it would seem that for many organisations, this awareness often fails to translate into properly thought out and well-executed strategies for managing the vendors that supply the technology.

• How to measure your IT vendor management office

  By Patrick Connaughton | 06 April, 2010 05:00

  Over the past few years, many companies have taken the first steps in setting up an IT Vendor Management Office (VMO), but many are still very much in the early stages of refining what exactly the role of the VMO is within the organization. And the definition of a VMO can vary widely across companies - ranging from a broad marketing term used to describe the process or a specific term used to refer to a dedicated group of staff who oversee and manage suppliers.

Whitepapers about vendor management

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  Forecasting & Planning - Achieving the correct staffing levels with continually fluctuating demands

  Managing a high performing service operation in today’s complex environment requires a complete rethink of the way the operation is managed. Accepting current capacity without a real understanding of the fluctuating demand will lead to inconsistent performance. This white paper looks at the applications and processes available to achieve a balanced demand capacity curve, which will deliver consistent high quality service, satisfied customers and good margins.

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  Endpoint Security Performance in Desktop Virtualization Environments

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  Lower Security Risks with Virtual Patching

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  Top 10 Reasons to Embrace Workshifting