IT outsourcing not catching on with small.biz
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Why are they missing the boat? Small firms are falling behind in outsourcing IT functions, a new survey has revealed.â¦
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Two boxes bundling managed security service with SMB-level firewall/router/gateways and DSL have appeal to smaller businesses and admins managing remote users, but our testing raised questions.
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The software maker is moving along -- but not enough to get investors excited.
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Blog: Microsoft said it is teaming with Website Pros to offer an $80 monthly service to help small businesses set up and maintain their Web site.
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A growing number of home-based business are no longer trying make their small operations look bigger.
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India&#39;s IT services market is forecast to grow to $10.73 billion by 2011, at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 23.2 percent, as outsourcing emerges as a more favored option for companies in India, according to research firm Gartner.As companies are finding it more difficult to hire and retain staff in their IT departments, they are looking at external service providers as an option, hoping to also cut down costs, and better manage growth in the process, Gartner said Tuesday.Indian user companies compete for staff with Indian outsourcing companies and Indian operations of multinational companies, which hire new staff by the thousands each quarter.Staff attrition is however not the key reason why companies are outsourcing, said Arun Gupta, chief technology officer, at Shopper&#39;s Stop, a top Indian retail chain. Driving outsourcing in India is a growing demand for new technologies and applications. Shopper&#39;s Stop has six IT projects in progress with another 12 projects planned for the next six to 12 months.Rather than creating and managing a large IT organization in house, the company is working with service partners to support its 45 IT staff, Gupta said. Some of the functions it outsources are network maintenance, desktop and server maintenance, monitoring enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, and software development, he added.A number of large banks and telecommunications service providers are already outsourcing key IT operations, though the key winners so far have been multinational services companies. Many Indian outsourcing companies had neglected the Indian market in favor of exports, according to a survey last year by Gartner. But that may be changing as the&#160;weakening dollar puts pressure on rupee&#160;realization from exports.IBM,&#160;Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and Wipro together accounted for 26.1 per cent of IT services vendor market share in India last year, according to Gartner. IBM was the top vendor, with 11.2 per cent market share. TCS and Wipro occupy the second and third positions with 10.9 and 4.1 percent market shares, respectively.However, the Indian IT services market is still fragmented, with the majority of the market being serviced by smaller local players that account for close to 40 per cent of the IT services market, according to Gartner.&quot;We have looked at smaller players for very small and specific jobs, but for larger jobs, running into a number of years, and which require a variety of skills, we look at large Indian companies or multinational services companies,&quot; Gupta said.The key segments of the Indian IT services market are hardware maintenance and support, software support, consulting, development and integration, IT management, and process management, Gartner said.
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Many small-business applications that offer templated tools for business owners often fly under the radar, widely unknown to larger businesses.
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This company outsources its data center hosting, so to ride herd on one finicky application, a pilot fish and his team get several admin IDs to manage it remotely. That works well -- for a few months.
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A new survey by IAG Consulting finds that among two-thirds of companies polled, it is &quot;improbable&quot; that an IT project will be considered an overall success due to inadequately or improperly gathered business requirements.Fifty percent of these companies&#39; projects could be termed &quot;runaways,&quot; marked by at least two of these three factors: Taking more than 180 percent of estimated time to be completed, going over 160 percent of the established budget, and delivering less than 70 percent of the desired capabilities.The other 32 percent of the companies surveyed enjoy a &quot;probable&quot; chance of success for IT project, according to the study, which surveyed more than 100 midsized and Fortune 1000 companies in North America.&quot;The numbers here came back far, far bigger than we ever expected,&quot; said Keith Ellis, vice president of IAG, which is based in the U.S. and Canada. The independent company focuses on business requirements analysis.&quot;One big reason that really stands out for me is that people tend to look at requirements as a document, not as a process. If you do that, you&#39;re going to fail,&quot; Ellis said. &quot;Here&#39;s one of those cases where the means is as or more important as the end.&quot;Good requirements analysis can ensure a project&#39;s scale is minimized, but not at the expense of meeting a business&#39; needs, according to the study. Another hallmark sees changes to requirements occurring infrequently, because the proper level of consensus has already been reached.The study weighed development projects, which cost at least $250,000 and involved &quot;significant new functionality,&quot; as opposed to matters like maintenance or a rollout of new client machines. The projects consisted of either internally developed software or application implementations. Their average scope was $3 million, according to IAG.The damage was worst when non-IT business analysts were in charge of the requirements. Those projects came in at nearly double their budgets and took more than 245 percent of their allotted time, according to IAG.When IT workers managed the requirements analysis, the results were only slightly better, with budget overruns at 163 percent and time at 172 percent.The best results came when business and IT worked together on defining requirements. There, budgets ran an average of 143 percent and time, 159 percent.The study suggested many companies are working on an ad-hoc basis. More than half &quot;did not have professional, trained staff dedicated to the function of getting requirements, and the vast majority view the process of getting requirements to be inefficient,&quot; the report states.Companies should form a &quot;center of excellence&quot; for business-requirements gathering managed by both IT and business employees, the study concluded.IAG conducted the study with the help of analyst Michael O&#39;Neil and Info-Tech Research Group over the past several months, Ellis said.
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(InfoWorld) - Indian outsourcer Infosys TechnologiesÂ is expanding its facility in Brno in the Czech Republic, to boost its ability to deliver services to its European customers. The expanded facility will have a capacity of 350 seats by January, Infosys of Bangalore said on Wednesday. Infosys has about 130 staff in Brno, who deliver business process outsourcing (BPO) services such as sales order management, finance and accounts, market research and underwriting for clients in 16 European countries. Over 80 percent of the staff at Brno are hired locally, and operations are run in 13 different languages including German, French, and Spanish, Infosys said. The company is planning to also deliver IT services such as infrastructure management and package implementations such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) from Brno once the expanded facility is in operation. A number of Indian outsourcing companies including Wipro and HCL Technologies have set up operations in Europe or acquired companies there with an eye to the European market. Currently, the U.S. and U.K. account for most of the revenue of Indian outsourcing companies. Although companies in the U.K. outsource software development and business processes to India, the rest of Europe has been comparatively slower in outsourcing to India. Continental Europe accounts for only about 12 to 13 percent of India's outsourcing revenues, according to India's National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom). Infosys' revenue from Europe has grown by 60 percent year-on-year for the last three years. Europe accounted for about 25 percent of the revenue of Infosys in the last quarter, but most of that came from the U.K., according to a spokeswoman for Infosys. Besides expanding in Brno, Infosys is also setting up a development facility in Swindon in the U.K. The company also has a development center in Germany, and a center in Mauritius that is designed to address European customers because the population in Mauritius is multilingual, the spokeswoman said. Having centers in Europe helps Infosys build up capabilities in the specific European languages required by customers, and also comply with European Union regulations on data protection and privacy, which require that certain types of data should not be sent for processing outside the E.U., the spokeswoman added.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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The most pervasive problem in running IT is not a specific technology issue at all. Itâs dealing with bad vendors. Even if you have been able to reduce your IT operation down to a pure open source environment on the software side, hardware still must be purchased through commercial channels. In the post-boom IT age, the power has supposedly shifted from vendor to buyer, but IT managers continue to be manipulated by vendors who donât always act in the customerâs best interest. To keep vendors in line, IT managers need to stay on the ball â and punish bad behavior when it occurs by finding new suppliers.
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As small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) save more data and rely on it more, they are turning to networked storage even under the burden of limited budgets and IT expertise.Regulatory requirements, more sophisticated applications and reliance on Web-based supply chains all are forcing small businesses to collect and store more information, according to IDC analyst Rick Villars. They may not have enough data to fill an enterprise-class storage system today, but they want systems that let them add more capacity as they grow, he said.EMC is aiming at this growing market with its Clariion AX4, a platform that can scale from a few terabytes of storage to 60TB and take advantage of many advanced EMC storage management applications designed for large enterprises. The company was set to announce and ship it Tuesday.Swervepoint, a provider of promotional gifts in Middleton, Mass., has less than 1TB of data between its two locations but wants to be able to add storage capacity without buying new servers.&quot;We should buy our servers for the server qualities and buy storage for our server needs,&quot; said Kevin Phoenix, principal in charge of operations and administration.The 15-employee company&#39;s main concerns about networked storage are cost and complexity, and the AX4 eased those worries, Phoenix said. Swervepoint, which counts EMC as one of its own clients, has been a beta tester of the AX4 and purchased a unit. It came with management software that was easy to use, said Phoenix, who said he handles IT for the company but is not an IT specialist.The AX4 comes with at least 3TB of storage and can be expanded by stringing together as many as five systems with 12 drives each. Each AX4 can be ordered with either a Fibre Channel or a iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) connection, meeting demand for IP (Internet Protocol) connectivity among SMBs, according to Barry Ader, senior director of Clariion marketing at EMC. Smaller companies tend not to have expertise with Fibre Channel, which is typically used in large enterprises, he said. On the AX4, there is no price difference between the two interface options.The systems will come with 750GB drives at first, but 1TB drives will be available starting in March, opening the door to the AX4&#39;s top-end storage capacity of 60TB, Ader said. Within the full AX4 system and even within each enclosure, users can mix and match SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) and SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) drives. Companies can use management tools including snapshot, failover, business continuity and Microsoft Exchange replication capability with the AX4.By mixing SAS and SATA drives, users can set up a tiered storage system in which the more critical data is on better-performing, more expensive SAS drives and less critical on lower-performance SATA disks, said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT. Support for enterprise-class software is another benefit of the AX4, which goes up against SMB storage products from competitors including Network Appliance and Equalogic, King said. In particular, its support for virtualization software from EMC&#39;s VMware subsidiary appears to be stronger than in competing products, King said.
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Running a business doesn't have to involve so much work.
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When outsourcing IT operations offshore, companies often focus on lower costs and more productivity -- and fail to keep in mind the cultural differences that could affect their security, said experts at the Gartner IT Security Summit.
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Despite concerns over procurement process Southampton has outsourced its IT services to Capita, despite criticism of the procurement process and concerns about local jobs.â¦
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Online marketplaces that offer eBay-like services for matching companies with freelance developers are attracting IT managers who want flexible workforces -- and lower labor costs.
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IBM's loss of its huge JPMorgan contract comes as outsourcing deals are getting smaller.