Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
dbDoctor has reengineered the database monitoring process for Oracle and Sun Microsystems systems. ‘Databases touch each and every facet of your business. When they go down, all hell breaks loose and losses immediately start to accumulate,’ says Michael Misheff, vice president, sales and marketing, for dbDoctor.
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Last month Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, was giving a presentation to stock analysts when the ground shook. No, it wasn’t the power of the newest version of Microsoft Office he was displaying. At that moment Seattle, Washington was hit by a massive earthquake which caused billions of dollars in property damage.\x0d\x0a\x0d\x0aProperty owners prescient enough to have purchased earthquake insurance are now rebuilding with the funds they received from their insurance policies. The insurance companies have enough cash on hand to pay off their policy holders because they know how to underwrite risk.
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Difficult business problems require solutions that are based on sound reasonings. The Internet and new economy have so drastically changed the way business is done that today’s top execs must focus on how to change their companies. Change is necessary as technology and markets evolve, despite whether a company is competing successfully or losing market share. Long-range plans keep getting shorter and shorter, and the need for risk management in such an environment is increasingly recognized as a competency. Most organizations now are a hybrid of some internal departments or divisions and some alliances with outsourcers for various business processes. Why do so many chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief information officers (CIOs) turn to outsourcing as a strategy to achieve their business objectives? Upon what reasoning do they base these decisions? Adam Braunstein, senior research analyst with the Robert Frances Group, whose clients are the top echelon of Fortune…
Outsourcing Center, Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer
Building for Future Competition and Growth Dramatic technological changes now regularly unsettle our ways of doing business, and this trend promises to wreak even more havoc in the future as technological advances occur even more quickly. Future organizational success already depends on strategies to make companies more agile in their ability to change so that their competitors don’t pass them by. Where will your company be five years from now? Successful companies will have evolved to operate in fresh new, more effective ways. Motivational speaker and author, John L. Mason, advises people that if the shoe fits, they shouldn’t wear it, for they are not allowing room for growth. Companies that don’t change but continue to operate as they do today will become eccentric, for growth and success require change. To stay in the game, executives must decide to stop doing things the way they have always been done, realizing that organizations have limitations and can’t be good at everything. To
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Corporate layoffs command the headlines. Inflation numbers are jumping up and the NASDAQ index is diving down. Yet some industries still can’t find enough people to meet their growing orders. Are we heading toward the locust years or new boom? While economists are debating the answer, businesses have to decide what to do. Should they hire more people to be ready for a surge? Or should they lay off staff to stay lean and mean in preparation for the hard times ahead? Decisions today can affect the bottom line tomorrow. But one thing is clear in the cloudy horizon: Outsourcing is one of the best tools to deal with change in uncertain times, says Michel Janssen, chief operating officer of Outsourcing Center in Dallas, Texas.
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
The I Love You virus did very unloving things to the computers of email readers who couldn’t resist opening the infected note. The malicious message did billions of dollars of damage. And an avalanche of email messages brought down Yahoo in a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack. These high profile events made companies realize the Internet is full of lurkers and some of them are evil people.
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Buyers are interested in transformation, says Joe Ragusa, vice president, Transformational Outsourcing for IBM Global Services, based in Somers, New York. They see outsourcing vendors as change agents who can provide the skills, processes and technology they need to enter the brave new economy. IT is enabling, adds Ragusa. The Web has created some strange bedfellows. Heated competitors are now working together in business-to-business (B2B) exchanges…
Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer
Long before the Internet, the travel industry has been in the forefront of computer automation. As far back as the 1970s, airlines that couldn’t harness technology effectively crashed and burned. (Pan Am and Eastern, for example.) But because of the complex nature of booking ocean liners, cruising has been the last bastion for manual bookings, according to David Anderson, vice president of technology for GoCruiseDirect.com, a Miami, Florida company.
George Kimball
Application service providers (ASP’s) promise to make all this go away. Rather than pay large license fees and hire swarms of consultants, companies may rent the software, or buy applications by the drink, paying so much per user, per month. Applications will be delivered to the desktop, over the Internet. Just pay the money, and someone else will buy, install, connect and configure everything. The allure is plain, and has aroused interest in the marketplace, and from service providers, including well-financed startups, as well as such stalwarts as Intel and Oracle. The appeal is especially strong to new and smaller companies, who can adopt standard functions from popular packages more easily than larger, long-established organizations.
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