vendor management - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• CIO-plus: Message to tech superstars: Quit while at the top - or regenerate

  A roundup of news, reviews and trends for business technology leaders.

• 10 steps to ensure your IT outsourcing deal fails

  The successful relationships share the same best practices while the failed arrangements are uniquely flawed. But, in fact, the most disappointing deals do share common characteristics.
  

• Break in the clouds

  Many organisations that use cloud services can find themselves saddled with unexpected responsibilities. What challenges can businesses expect to encounter as part of consuming cloud services, and how may these challenges be overcome?
  

• Outsourcing customers focus on SLAs to detriment of business outcomes

  Business strategy is getting short shrift in outsourcing relationships while outsourcing customers and providers focus excessively on basic service level agreements (SLAs), according to a recent survey conducted by Accenture and the Shared Services and Outsourcing Network (SSON).

• Scott Green secures key Datacom post

  Former Axon CEO Scott Green is set to take up a new role as director of IT management at Datacom.
  Green’s role, which is Auckland-based, begins on 1 December.

• Intel outlines cloud vision with customer and vendor alliances

  Intel has announced several new elements of its Cloud 2015 vision aimed at making cloud-based computing more interoperable, secure and simplified through alliances with big-spending organisations and software and hardware vendors.
  The processor giant helped announce the launch of the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), a coalition of large enterprises which will lay out future hardware and software requirements for open and interoperable datacentre solutions.

• Datacraft purchase of Integral/Axon confirmed

  Datacraft has confirmed that it has made a conditional offer to buy Integral/Axon Computer Systems. The transaction is expected to be completed by November 1. Neither party will disclose the purchase price.
  It’s being positioned as an acquisition of capability. Datacraft NZ managing director Robin Hartendorp says. Datacraft set out to acquire a company that provided strong competencies in IT infrastructure management to complement Datacraft’s network management focus.

• Government must rethink IT management strategy: analyst

  A lack of flexibility towards IT management in the government sector may hinder the development of cloud computing and virtualisation.

• HP sues Hurd on confidentiality issues

  Hewlett-Packard is suing its former CEO, Mark Hurd, who was named co-president of rival Oracle on Monday, saying his hiring violates the terms of a severance agreement he signed with HP.
  Hurd left HP last month after a scandal involving an undisclosed relationship with a contractor and alleged improprieties with expense reports.

• Three areas where FUD needs to stop

  There is a new breed of animal appearing in the infosec community, according to Dr. Jimmy Blake, chief security officer for Mimecast, a cloud-services company based in London, and host of the blog Cloud Computing and Bad Behavior.
  The new breed is what he calls the "attention monger" (he actually used a more colorful word, but we toned it down for this article.) The attention monger is courting headlines with the media that add no real value to information security.

• Oxygen makes senior hires

  SAP provider Oxygen Business Solutions has appointed Damian Swaffield as New Zealand general manager for consulting, and Datta Supomo as its local business development manager.
  Swaffield is the former Skycity CIO and has also been CIO and chief technology officer at TVNZ. Swaffield says “this is an amazing opportunity to lead a talented and successful professional services team that is the leading specialist SAP integration and consulting company in Australia and New Zealand”.

• Three reasons your outsourcer won’t innovate

  Internal IT organisations choose to outsource for any number of reasons: to cut costs, improve service, increase efficiency. Increasingly, they're seeking innovation from their IT outsourcing partners, even though many don't have a clear picture of what innovation means in the context of outsourcing. Consequently, those IT departments are not getting much innovation from their service providers.
  According to a 2009 Forrester Research survey, 38 percent of IT outsourcing customers said lack of innovation or continuous improvement was their greatest challenge with existing vendors - up from 33 percent the previous year.

• Fine print disappointment seen in cloud computing services

  This is the type of analyst report headline that cloud computing vendors don't want to read: "Empty Promises and Tough Luck: Yankee Group Exposes the Cloud's Fine Print."
  That's the crux of Yankee Group's latest research effort, Cloud 99.99: The Small Print Exposed, by VP and senior research fellow Camille Mendler.

• 'Start playing in the sandbox'

  Aspects of cloud computing have been available to - and rejected by - IT outsourcing customers for years, from hosted applications to on-demand hardware support. But as the breadth of the cloud has expanded to include a growing number of software-, platforms- and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings that can be quickly deployed as needed with low management overhead and little vendor interaction, the temptation to move away from traditional IT services provisioning is mounting.
  On the other hand, having your IT services in the cloud involves a host of risks, from data control issues to lack of transparency to the financial stability of new providers. Prospective cloud service customers must take into account a number of unique issues associated with cloud delivery in conjunction with the criticality of the software, data and services they're considering transitioning from a traditional IT services model, says Dan Masur, a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of law firm Mayer Brown.

• The Masters: 'Powered' by IBM technology

  When viewers tune in to coverage of the 2010 Masters golf tournament, they will see IBM advertisements on the CBS and ESPN TV broadcasts and the IBM logo on the Masters.com website. Viewers will most likely hear about IBM's vision of a "smarter planet" campaign. (I always look forward to the guy who says "Smarter Stuttgart.")
  Viewers don't have to fret about being overwhelmed with the volume of ads. This is the Masters, after all. The annual golf tournament prides itself on a "less is more" philosophy when it comes to advertisements. Commercial interruptions are the exception, not the norm: During eight hours of TV coverage on Saturday and Sunday of the 2009 Masters, Nielsen data showed just 36 minutes of commercials.