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Who do you trust?

The final months of an IT services contract are an ideal time for outsourcing customers to negotiate with their vendors for improvements in price and service quality. As the deal end-date approaches, the customer wields more power than at any other point in the relationship since the client can seriously consider alternatives without the threat of termination fees or other penalties.

When India's second-largest outsourcer, Infosys Technologies, opened a China office six years ago, it followed the offshoring industry into a country seen as a rising alternative to India. Since then, China has mainly served as an added base from which Infosys can serve global customers, but now the company is now looking to China's domestic market for continued growth.

Dice.com's Open Web tool, currently in beta, lets recruiters harness the power of the social Web to target candidates, even if they're not actively looking for a job.

Prices for outsourced desktop support have been decreasing steadily over the last three to four years, but some recent rock-bottom deals may be too good to be true.

The ever-increasing economic pressure continues to drive IT professionals to take a closer look at infrastructure outsourcing as an efficient means of filling their resource gap and driving business transformation. As a result there are a number of best practices in IT infrastructure outsourcing engagements that can help the process along.

For Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and other IT vendors, the only thing worse than knowing there is a meeting of global IT sourcing and vendor management executives is being a fly on the wall at a meeting of IT sourcing and vendor management executives. At a recent meeting of Forrester's Sourcing and Vendor Management Leadership Board, the words "cost" and "cutting" were rarely separated during any discussion among the executives in the room - and their specific quotes regarding some vendors would make my father blush.