Five out of 10 outsourcing buyers will up their bets on applications outsourcing, according to a joint survey from KPMG and HfS Research, but they continue to be disappointed by providers' analytical capabilities and innovation.
Follow these simple steps to show your IT outsourcing provider a little love and get more attention than other customers in return (without giving away too much).
In part 2 of our two-part series on IT offshoring lessions, we look at seven more examples of successful IT outsourcing offshoring best practices.
The need to remain competitive has kept offshoring an essential part of nearly every company's sourcing strategy. The questions that remain are what and how to offshore. Offshore pioneers who have navigated the changing IT offshoring terrain have some answers based on a decade's worth of lessons. In part 1 of a two-part series, we look at seven of those lessons.
The rise of multisourcing has thrust operating level agreements in the IT outsourcing spotlight. But establishing OLAs among service providers can be difficult.
The speculation surrounding Dell's intention to go private is over. What remains are questions about what the new ownership model will mean for Dell's IT services business and its outsourcing customers.
When Ricoh Europe realized its IT environment was both spiraling out of control and environmentally unfriendly, it turned to a IT services provider for help. Working with Infosys, Ricoh developed a private cloud that helped it consolidate nine data centers into two, cutting infrastructure costs and reducing carbon dioxide emissions significantly.
At this time last year, we predicted that 2012 would be the year cloud computing hype ended. We said application development would migrate from offshore to cities stateside. And we forecasted that IT service providers would become more relationship-oriented. Now it's time to see how those predictions panned out.
Poor communication, shortsighted contracts -- don't get derailed by an IT outsourcing agreement gone awry
Two weeks ago, the CIO of Texas penned a seven-page letter outlining the chronic failures of the state's nearly four-year outsourcing relationship - a deal the Texas governor had briefly suspended in 2008 citing service delivery problems that he said put the state's agencies in danger.
The outlook for the IT outsourcing market is not unlike the outlook for the economy as a whole: It's "unusually uncertain," to use U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's words.
Aspects of cloud computing have been available to-and rejected by-IT outsourcing customers for years, from hosted applications to on-demand hardware support. But as the breadth of the cloud has expanded to include a growing number of software-, platforms- and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings that can be quickly deployed as needed with low management overhead and little vendor interaction, the temptation to move away from traditional IT services provisioning is mounting.
For all the vagaries of IT services, traditional IT outsourcing has always been quite tangible--servers, data centers, networks, specifications, man-hours, lines of code. The rise of cloud computing, however, is changing all of that with flexible, asset-free IT services available on an as-needed basis for more aspects of enterprise technology.
Whether any future U.S. jobs bills will contain anti-offshoring measures remains up in the air. But outsourcing customers don't have to wait to protect themselves from potential protectionist legislation.
Two major trends led to lower prices for outsourced IT services last year--the global economic downturn and the uptick in remote infrastructure management (RIM) adoption.