ASP Archives

Healthcare’s Biggest Challenge

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Behind closed doors, discussions about the biggest challenge for both providers and payers in the healthcare industry are not about HIPAA compliance. It’s about how to be profitable. Given the numerous industry problems besetting companies, revenue has been drastically cut, and most have lost millions of dollars for several years in a row. The solution, as many are discovering, is for organizations to become more efficient. And the only way to accomplish that objective is to outsource non-core business processes and take advantage of outsourcers’ expertise and technological resources.

Digital Rights Management

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Born in August 1999, TrustData Solutions Corporation has already matured enough to take giant steps in the eSecurity arena. HIPAA experts agree TrustData’s solutions are probably the most advanced technology today for allowing companies to enable HIPAA compliance.

In the Pink

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

PinkElephant is a Dutch ASP headquartered at Zoetermeer. The ASP is a PinkRoccade nv company, one of the most successful traditional IT outsourcing vendors in Holland. And that’s exactly how the ASP market is developing in Europe. The quick starting, independent American startup is the slow moving elephant in Europe, according to Leon Fock, business unit director. PinkRoccade nv was formed in 1950 as the Mechanical Administration, which was part of the central government of the Netherlands. Every 20 years the IT outsourcing vendor has reinvented itself. In the 1970s the department morphed into the Government Computer Center. In 1990 the department became a public limited liability company as part of a privatization move.

Wireless: To Be or Not To Be

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Wireless scares people, says Adam Braunstein, senior research analyst with the Robert Frances Group. The concept that you can get anything anywhere is easy to understand and sounds great, and what company wouldn’t want to give those capabilities to its staff and customers where appropriate? The problem is that the application is extremely difficult. There are several warring technologies out there, Braunstein explains, and the wireless carriers are having huge difficulties. Financial institutions and the healthcare industry are the early adopters of wireless technology. It’s also an ideal solution for a mobile sales force, traveling executives, field technicians, logistics and other processes. The media has touted the enormous benefits for companies to adopt this technology as an extension of access to the Internet while, at the same time, making a lot of noise about the immaturity of the technology and its failures in addressing business applications and user needs.

ASPs Hit the Wireless Bull’s Eye

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Our mission at the Outsourcing Center is to promote outsourcing to be the first choice in strategic tools to use in achieving business objectives. One of the best ways to do that is to present to you illustrations of excellence in outsourcing, thus showing the value and benefits that can be accomplished. Of the many fine relationships we encounter, the best become recipients of our annual Editor’s Choice Awards. In this very popular annual awards issue of the Outsourcing Journal, we relate their stories so that you may duplicate their successes.

SLAs That Work

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Service level agreements (SLA) are crucial to ASP buyers. SLAs create structure for the relationship and help both parties measure performance. But how do you write an SLA? How do you monitor them? Who is responsible for managing the SLAs?

Outsourcing is Taking Three Forks

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

Traditionally, outsourcing has been IT oriented. Today, however, outsourcing is taking three different paths. I see outsourcing falling into three distinct categories: the traditional IT suppliers,† the application service providers (ASP), and the business process outsourcing (BPO) suppliers. Different currents are buffeting each sector. Historically, IBM, EDS and CSCformed the top tier of the IT …

Outsourcing Grows as Economy Slows

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

With the threat of Y2K glitches, many companies delayed outsourcing commitments during the final half of 1999. But companies returned to outsourcing in 2000. Megadeals lit up the landscape, says Bob Pryor, vice president of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (CGEY) and head of its Global Operate – Americas outsourcing business in the U.S…

Big Companies Embrace Multi-Process BPO

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

The trend to outsource non-core business processes is ‘irreversible,’ says John Barnsley, global leader for Business Process Outsourcing for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and is steadily moving to include multiple activities. Barnsley attributes an overall increase in acceptance of BPO as an important strategic tool to the rapid transformation in technology. Constant change, accelerated by the Internet, has altered companies’ risk equations.

Sorting Through the Rubble

Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer

New vendors around every corner. Mega deals. Dead dotcoms. And even some fallout from Y2K. They littered the year 2000 battlegrounds in the outsourcing arena. Gartner Dataquest’s Bruce Caldwell, senior analyst-outsourcing, recently completed reports and forecasts from his company’s surveys of end user wants and needs in the world of IT. He says the turmoil in the IT services marketplace this past year was a factor in a dip in the IT services revenue that had been forecasted for 2000.

Research & Insight

ASP

Healthcare’s Biggest Challenge

In the Pink

ASPs Hit the Wireless Bull’s Eye

SLAs That Work

Outsourcing Grows as Economy Slows

Big Companies Embrace Multi-Process BPO

Sorting Through the Rubble

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