Listen to the political rhetoric in the current U.S. presidential campaign and you would think offshoring is the key reason for the high American unemployment rate. Nowhere should this be more apparent than in manufacturing. However, a recent study by the Manpower Group, a provider of workforce solutions, explains the situation is far more nuanced. [...]
As a result of globalization and the ability of consumers to purchase products at the lowest cost, manufacturers in China have become an integral part of the supply chains of many consumer product companies. With the high level of integration of consumer product companies and their overseas manufacturers in China, there is an increasing reliance [...]
Wipro Voice: Discusses How to manage information assets while moving from an In-House model to the Cloud Today’s enterprise is no longer confined to the four walls of its corporate campus. Growing emphasis on collaboration, efficiency and innovation is changing the behavior of today’s enterprise; this change is impacting the IT landscape as well. As [...]
There’s a rumor circulating in Europe, igniting fear and paranoia among businesses and consumers alike: Big Brother is alive and well and living in a U.S.-based cloud. Allow us to explain. In November of 2011, two European companies announced the creation of the first fully European “Database-as-a-Service” cloud offering – one that provided a “safe [...]
Hint: 12 Months Out is TOO Late When should you start working on your next outsourcing contract? Many organizations do not address the end of a contract until the last year of its term. The notification period in the contract, typically six t-to12 months, usually triggers this discussion. However I believe this is a mistake. [...]
Companies spent lots of money and almost as many hours transforming their applications for optimal performance. Phew! We’re done! Not so, says Ed Quinn, vice president, applications management, HP Enterprise Services. In his experience, corporations need to keep their newly transformed applications optimized. Senior Editor Beth Ellyn Rosenthal questioned him to find out how to [...]
The entire value chain for consumer products sourced or manufactured in Asia has become increasingly interconnected and mutually reliant—ownership of physical manufacturing assets and intellectual property rights has become more ambiguous and contentious. With ambiguity over ownership and rights to manufacturing assets, customers lose the key leverage of mobility. While brand companies were able to [...]
Can you even remember what it was like to have to be in a “place” to make a call? When a flat tire meant a search for a pay phone? When email was something that accumulated between Friday and Monday, until the office computer was powered back on? It’s hard to believe that when the [...]
Definition: “Cloud computing provides on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that users can rapidly provision and release with minimum client or provider interaction.” — From Cloud Sourcing for the Corporation by Ben Trowbridge, CEO, Alsbridge “I think there will be an explosion” in the near term, predicts Steven Morris, senior [...]
Outsourcing providers have been offering their clients analytics services for at least 15 years. “But today the interest in analytics is completely unprecedented,” reports Pankaj Kulshreshtha, senior vice president, analytics and research at Genpact. Earlier, clients only considered a few specialized functions were appropriate for the ‘quants’; today it’s all functions, he notes. “Procurement, marketing [...]
If ITO were a movie, Cloud, analytics and mobility would be the headliners. Although this trendsetting triad is having a dramatic impact on how services are consumed and how companies operate, a number of other significant trends are emerging in the ITO space. This article focuses on those unsung heroes and the impact they’ll have [...]
In the world of IT, Cloud has been the media darling, taking center stage in every conversation and publication. While it’s true that Cloud is a major trend in and of itself, its adoption has caused a domino effect in the industry as a whole. The advent of utility-based pricing, in combination with a more [...]
The big headline in BPO: The continuing global economic changes are causing a paradigm shift in the way organizations are doing business, according to Dinanath Kholkar, Head, BFS & INS, BPO Services, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). “Higher returns on investments, faster turnaround times and the need to reach out to emerging markets are the need [...]
The past few years have not been kind to retailers. Sluggish economies, shrinking margins and a more cost-conscious consumer have taken their proverbial toll. “We’ve seen retail sales increase by 5 percent to 6 percent, yet profits declined from 3.5 percent to 2 percent. So, even though stores are selling more, they’re making less,” explained [...]
Indian BPOs got their start competing on price. Now there are geographies that offer even lower prices. At the same time, buyers’ shopping criteria includes more than just price. How are BPOs adopting to the new pressures? Here are four major world trends affecting Indian BPOs and their productivity goals. 1. The changing marketplace “The [...]
Enterprise IT and compliance groups agree on one thing for certain: their cloud environments could use some work on the security front. Less than half of the 1,018 IT security practitioners and enterprise compliance officers surveyed by the Ponemon Institute, which conducts independent research on privacy, data protection and information security policy, believe their organizations [...]
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