Research & Insight

Vendor Management

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.

2001: An Ecommerce Odyssey

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

This year will be the year of ecommerce outsourcing. But the seeds were sown last year, according to Richard Raysman, a partner at Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner LLP, a law firm in New York City specializing in outsourcing. Last year startups popped up and new ecommerce companies gained market share. Raysman mentions i2, Commerce One and Ariba as three relative newcomers that last year proved they could be enormously successful in the ecommerce arena…

Time to Renegotiate

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

From 1992 to 1994, many major corporations signed 10-year outsourcing contracts. The end of the tunnel is in sight, but now, the world is much different with the rise of the Internet. Robert Zahler, a partner with Shaw Pittman in Washington, D.C., says many of these buyers are beginning to gear up and decide what to do in this new business environment. They are wrestling with the choice of renegotiating with their current suppliers or putting the contract out for a competitive bid…

Outsourcing’s New Risks

Outsourcing Center, Beth Ellyn Rosenthal, Senior Writer

Academic: Professor James Brian Quinn Outsourcing’s New Risks By Beth Ellyn Rosenthal Today, the greatest risk in outsourcing is to not outsource. So says James Brian Quinn, William and Josephine Buchanan Professor of Management emeritus at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire. Without outsourcing, companies can’t keep up, observes Quinn. The second biggest risk today is to keep innovation in-house, continues the professor. He calls the idea of assigning all corporate innovation in-house a macho shibboleth. Today, the most successful companies use outsourcing for innovation. He cites Dell Computer and Cisco Systems as leaders in their fields who rely on their suppliers to do the development work.

What Does an ASP Do? Let Me Count The Ways

Jessica Goepfert of IDC

International Data Corporation (IDC) in Framingham, Massachusetts completed a year-end study to determine the breadth of knowledge about application service providers. Half the executives interviewed had heard of the term ASP but only 6 percent had a detailed knowledge of what an application service provider does, reports Jessica Goepfert, senior ASP analyst for IDC.

When the Government Comes Calling

Raymond Angus

This question is important to the solvency of any organization, but it is crucial to those companies doing business with the federal government, says George Phares, President of Strategic Direction Resource, Inc. For seven years, Phares’ company, based in Houston, Texas; has specialized in auditing human resources for federal contractors. Why, you may ask, do human resources need auditing? Because once a year, each federal contractor is required to file a compliance report with the government…

Technology Expedites Refund Process

Linda Bryza

Access specializes in marketing telecommunication audits to medium to large national businesses and government entities. The company also offers utility and energy services targeted to a California base. Access is the exclusive representative for nationally recognized companies in each of these fields. The simplicity and value of outsourcing an audit – the prospect of saving 10-30% on a company’s telecommunication costs with no upfront fees and minimal staff time involvement, make going forward with one an easy decision…

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