Research & Insight

Author archives

The Flexi-pricing Route to Cloud Innovation

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

I’ve got a little story about cloud solutions. A wealthy looking woman entered an optician’s shop, pointed to a very stylish frame and declared to the shopkeeper, “I’d like to buy that. How much?” Gauging at a glance her capacity to pay, he replied: “$500.” When she didn’t bat an eyelid, he added quickly, “for …

What to Outsource in the 24×7 Marketing Age

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

The digital age has changed customer DNA forever. They have no patience with 9 to 5 and they’re shredding the concept of after-hours and weekends. They have a voice, and that voice demands to be heard whenever, wherever. Enter outsourcing social media marketing. Working hours, what’s that? Banks—previously such strict observers of “working hours” all …

Five Steps to Customizing Service Level Agreements

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

Today’s Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are not simple documents that define the duration and the service to be delivered against a timetable with a handful of pre-determined performance parameters. Rather, they are documents that include cleverly negotiated customization, additional provisions, provider and buyer obligations, reporting methodologies, penalties and rewards. A well-crafted and customized SLA document …

What Causes Outsourcing Failures?

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

One of the questions that continue to hound buyers and providers of outsourcing is how to mitigate the risk of failure. This is despite a longer history of outsourcing than you would suspect—outsourcing can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution. For 150 years, until 1900, industry in Europe outsourced its requirements. Functions like accounting …

Analytics-as-a-Service: Shaping The Next Big Future IT Infrastructure Trend

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

The next big IT infrastructure trend is here: Analytics-as-a-Service (AaaS). We’ve seen how data can deliver insights in the hands of people like Hans Rosling, who has been listed amongst the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. Rosling has shown the history of 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 data …

Fabric Data Centers: The End of Complex, Expensive and Inefficient Infrastructure

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

What’s new in the data center? Last year, the buzz was around “fabric data centers” as organizations began to worry about costs. Did it make sense to have dedicated and expensive network, computing and storage resources around applications even if the IT infrastructure was outsourced? Could IT infrastructure costs be brought down? CIOs were under …

What is Outsourcing? It’s Our Past, Present and Future

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

What is outsourcing? It is not a new or alien phenomenon. Almost every organization outsources some aspect of its business. A paint company may outsource the manufacture of its paint cans; a mobile network may outsource its billing activity; a hospital may outsource medical waste disposal; an auto manufacturer may outsource servicing; and an IT …

Seven Success Factors for Outsourcing | Whitepaper

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

What are the top outsourcing success factors? Completely new challenges are surfacing. CIOs are being forced to consider Big Data, Analytics, Cloud, Virtualization, and Social and Mobile technologies to deliver business value. Customers are changing. Gen X is being replaced by an information hungry, mobile Gen Y. With rapid change, demand for flexibility and the …

Outsourcing Enterprise’s BYOD Adoption to Improve Chances of Success

Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

Are you at work? Check the mobile phone you are using. If you are in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, chances are your company has allowed you to bring your own smart phone to work. The results of a recent survey of the region released by Aruba Networks (NASDAQ: ARUN) suggests that …

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