Management Topics | Outsourcing - News, Features, and Slideshows

It's not just cheaper prices pushing down IT outsourcing contract values. The 'new normal' for outsourcing presents risks and opportunities for customers and IT service providers.

HCL and CSC, companies that have often competed for customers, have teamed to focus on legacy application modernization and cloud hosting. Could partnerships formed by rivals prove more valuable than mega-acquisitions as IT outsourcing providers respond to changing market dynamics?

Philippines outsourcing hub Cebu, closest to the path of the storm, did not take a direct hit. However, a lack of public statements from industry groups and providers reveals industry immaturity.

IT service providers are big on talk of innovation these days—except when it comes to their own sales practices. It seems as if many vendor sales teams have been pulling from the same bag of frustrating and ineffective tricks to try to win deals since the dawn of IT outsourcing.

One of CIOs' biggest concerns about the infrastructure-as-a-service model has been the loss of control over assets and management that enterprises might experience upon moving into a multi-tenant environment. While analysts and early adopters of infrastructure-as-a-service offerings have argued that such apprehension is rooted more in fear than fact, Amazon's recent public data center debacle has given everyone good reason to question the reliability of the public cloud.

Parceling out an IT services portfolio among a number of vendors is the new normal for IT outsourcing. However, these multi-sourcing arrangements are complicated -- if things go wrong there's no single provider to blame. Here are eight steps you can take to manage liability in a multi-sourced environment.