Research & Insight

Monthly archives: January, 2001

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…

From Future Shock to FutureSourcing

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Compaq buyers want their outsourcing vendors to introduce innovation and add value to their outsourcing contracts, observes Thomas Simmons, vice president, eBusiness Management Services for Compaq Global Services in Stow, Massachusetts. Buyers want their vendors to be part of managing today’s complexity. They want us to think of different ways of doing business that they would never have thought of, he says.

Outsourcing Now Has Ebusiness Component

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

When buyers decide to outsource today, you can bet ebusiness considerations are part of the contract. Paul Cofoni, president of the technology management group at Computer Science Corporation (CSC), says he rarely sees an outsourcing proposal that doesn’t have a substantial ecommerce component. Companies want to create a business-to-business (B2B) exchange, use ebusiness to enhance their supply chain management, or simply make it easier for their clients to have access to them…

IT Vendor as Change Agent

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…

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.

Equity Creates ‘Sticky’ Outsourcing Deals

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Information technology is moving from legacy information into a commodity. This inexorable shift is altering the nature of the relationship between buyer and supplier. That has been a pretty big change in the market last year, says Bob Chaffin, contract manager of IS for General Motors Corp. in Detroit, Michigan. Today, vendors must differentiate themselves in the marketplace and create an important distinction between their value added abilities and the commodity they are selling…

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.

Double Digit Growth for BPO

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

There was a huge up tick in business process outsourcing (BPO) in 2000, says Julie Giera, vice president at Giga, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research and advisory firm specializing in the technology industry. She attributes BPO’s double digit growth to the popularity of Web-enabled offerings. BPO soared because companies are seeing the benefits of using an application service provider (ASP). Giera defines the ASP model as application rental over the Web.

ASPs Ready for a Consolidation

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Application service providers (ASP) arrived en masse on the outsourcing scene last year and then proceeded to solidify their place in the marketplace. That was the major happening in the outsourcing world in 2000, according to Dean Davison, vice president at Meta Group, an IT advisory and research firm in Stanford, Connecticut…

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