The long-term evolution of industries has long been studied. A small market grows when competitors fill niches and primary demand increases. Innovation sparks products. Services refinement and differentiation then occurs. More providers enter the market and then, as the growth cycle matures, scale and leverage become forces for consolidation. Now joining those ranks: the IT and business process outsourcing industry.
Three recent transactions – HP buys EDS, Dell buys Perot Systems, and Xerox purchases ACS – point to a future where “one-stop shopping” indeed becomes a reality in the outsourcing market.
With IBM Global Services leading this pack of “full-service” providers, what… Read the rest
ACS, A Xerox Company, plans to consolidate its EMEA data centers into a smaller number of modular data centers. To minimize carbon emissions to meet the UK’s CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme legislative requirements, and to deliver IT services in the most environmentally sustainable way, the data center will utilize nylte Software’s Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution.
Making the Pulse List today are some areas where there’s a new beat with potential wide ramifications for the outsourcing world. The outcomes of these trailblazing activites remains to be seen, but players are plotting new courses throughout the world.
(1) Germany. A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and NASSCOM (India’s National Association of Software and Services Companies) focuses on business-growth opportunities for India’s outsourcing service providers in Germanic countries. Nearly all of the companies in these nations are small or midsize businesses. Most have a severe shortage of IT and engineering talent, and many are among the early adopters of outsourcing. However, they prefer nearshore rather than offshore providers. India’s outsourcing providers with… Read the rest
Who would be on your list of movements pulsating through the outsourcing world today? Here are the three that made my list.
REMEMBER WHEN?
You probably won’t be surprised to see that ACS’s acquisition of ExcellerateHRO from HP (announced earlier this week) made the list. But it’s not because of what it signifies in the human resources market for ACS. It’s because this is a classic specimen that should remind us of the need for ensuring an outsourcing contract is flexible (if not short-term) to allow for exiting a contract sooner than anticipated. That’s not to say that customers now shifted from HP… Read the rest
Two words: cloud and SaaS. They’re a common thread in discussions for outsourcing plans these days because the advantages these technology-access models present to buyers are truly significant. Both are increasingly marketed as outsourced services. But are they really outsourcing? If so, are these models causing companies to overlook crucial aspects of outsourcing arrangements? Or is outsourcing morphing to simply “sourcing” – commoditized services that really don’t involve a relationship factor, governance frameworks, and other complexities?
In other words, is the notion of what constitutes “outsourcing” changing? To find the answer to this question, I invited four experts to a… Read the rest
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