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ComputerLand Managed Services centre on the provision of essential IT services to organisations of typically between 1,000 and 10,000 seats. Many organisations do not have the delivery of IT services to the business as a core competence, and as such look to third-party providers to deliver these services on their behalf. Although the importance of a partnership relationship between the customer organisation and the Managed Services Provider (MSP) is much touted by all MSPs, there is clear evidence that C…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Maxine Holt
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HCL, through its Managed Desktop Services (MDS) solution, offers a set of services that cater to all aspects of the end-user computing environment, including asset management, desktop security, desktop Operating System (OS) and application imaging, and service desk support, all of which are delivered on a per-desktop, fixed-price model through the company’s offshore delivery centres. HCL’s delivery model revolves around standardising the client’s desktop environment and enforcing policies that enable adh…
Technology Audits - published 18/07/2008 - Balachandar Ganesh, Maxine Holt, Somak Roy
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Although service providers, and especially managed services providers, claim their solutions are highly applicable to the Small- to Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) sector, a recent Business Insights Report notes that the propensity of SMEs in the UK for using third-party providers is still relatively low.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 25/06/2008 - Maxine Holt
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The potential of a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solution to provide more accurate reporting on current and planned projects, and to improve the process of selecting, prioritising, and managing IT investments, is a relatively straightforward proposition.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 25/06/2008 - Roy Illsley
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Last month Butler Group ran its Managed Services Strategy Briefing in London. A number of key points arose throughout the presentations and customer stories that we heard, and these made me consider the evolving needs and requirements of customer organisations in terms of the use of third-party providers to deliver IT services.
OpinionWire Articles - published 19/06/2008 - Maxine Holt
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Last week HP made major announcements about the structure of its Labs and the focus of its research. The number of commercial organisations that still retain a pure research capability, as opposed to a development capability, is limited to a handful of the leading vendors. The challenge for these organisations is to ensure that pure research can be funded, especially in an era where the business focus is on value and a short-term view of return on investment.
OpinionWire Articles - published 19/06/2008 - Roy Illsley
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Last week, HP and EDS announced a definitive merger agreement under which HP will purchase EDS for US$25 per share – an overall transaction value of approximately US$13.9 billion, which constitutes the largest ever in the IT services market.
OpinionWire Articles - published 22/05/2008 - Richard Edwards
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BT and Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEC) are partnering to provide a converged communications solution for large multinational enterprises. The solution allows organisations to adopt a phased approach when migrating from an existing multi-technology environment to a centrally managed and converged communications platform, and offers a single Service Level Agreement (SLA), as well as a single point of contact for the end-to-end managed services. The offering combines Siemens OpenScape suite of commu…
OpinionWire Articles - published 15/05/2008 - Mark Blowers
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SAP confirmed rumours of a delay to its Software as a Service (SaaS) suite earlier this month, which are widely believed to be due to performance problems when scaling up, and will make its already late entry to the SaaS market later still, but it is unlikely to call into question the SaaS premise.
OpinionWire Articles - published 15/05/2008 - Angela Eager
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Next week Butler Group will be running its Managed Services Strategy Briefing at the CBI in central London, and as the keynote presenter in preparation for this event I have considered the changing requirements of organisations using Managed Services, and particularly the quality issues that they are faced with. There will always be some brick walls to be faced when looking at using a third-party provider to deliver IT services to an organisation, be they from those staff whose jobs depend on the area be…
OpinionWire Articles - published 15/05/2008 - Maxine Holt
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VMware Infrastructure v3.5 is a suite of virtualisation solutions for businesses, providing them with a basic virtualisation layer enabling the creation and management of multiple virtual machines, but extends the solutions to provide high availability, off-host backup, and support for SMP. As virtualisation moves beyond the simple server consolidation market towards the delivery of agile computing, VMware has produced a series of solutions packaged under its VMware Infrastructure 3 brand that help organ…
Technology Audits - published 07/05/2008 - Balachandar Ganesh, Roy Illsley
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Software obesity is the scourge of the modern data centre. General purpose operating systems have become so bloated with features that the system, network, and security administrators often need to work in concert to install, configure, and secure new operating system deployments.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 02/05/2008 - Emma McGrattan
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Although the Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB) is defined as a database, this is in effect somewhat of a misnomer. The CMDB should only hold the relationships from other entities that are held within various data sources throughout the organisation. The CMDB is not a single database instance, but is best described as a meta-database.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 02/05/2008 - Mike Thompson
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For most organisations, it is now understood that achieving returns on IT investment is not related simply to appropriate technology choices and successful deployment. The requirement to link IT projects with associated business change creates an environment in which realising the projected benefits depends not purely on on-time and on-budget delivery of a single project, but on managing multiple business and technology dimensions over the entire lifecycle of a programme.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 02/05/2008 - Tim Jennings
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CA SPECTRUM Network Fault Manager (CA SPECTRUM) version 8.1 is the latest release of the company’s fault management, root-cause analysis, impact analysis, and business service modelling software solution. CA SPECTRUM offers granular layer 2 and layer 3 network visibility down to individual port and circuit levels for Local Area Networks (LANs) and Wide Area Networks (WANs), supporting a wide range of wired and wireless and physical and virtual network environments. The solution provides the facilities re…
Technology Audits - published 30/04/2008 - Andy Kellett
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The Wyse Thin Computing range includes hardware and software solutions aimed at providing users with a near PC-like experience, and administrators with a platform for centralised provisioning and device management. Achieving a near desktop-like experience, the Wyse TCX suite delivers rich multimedia content over the ICA/RDP protocols. In addition, the thin client solution provides a higher level of security and reduces management costs and power consumption. While the company has partnered with VMware (a…
Technology Audits - published 30/04/2008 - Balachandar Ganesh, Maxine Holt, Somak Roy
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Oracle has turned up the heat in its lawsuit against SAP and what has become SAP’s unwanted subsidiary TomorrowNow, with fresh charges alleging that SAP AG and SAP America executives were aware that TomorrowNow might have been acting illegally, but failed to take action.
OpinionWire Articles - published 24/04/2008 - Angela Eager
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Following on from my OpinionWire article on 13 March 2008 (“Outsourcing: Flexibility Demanded in Renewals”) I concluded with the comment that IT outsourcing providers need to provide even more flexibility in their deals, and that in order to achieve this we do expect more of the large agreements to include subcontracts with the best-of-breed providers. However, a further analysis of the IT services contracts database on the CIO Knowledge Centre (www.cioknowledgecentre.com) shows that in the 100 larger de…
OpinionWire Articles - published 24/04/2008 - Andy Kellett
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Tideway Foundation is an agentless application dependency mapping tool. It provides an integrated view of applications and services and their relationships with data centre assets and their configurations, by aggregating and reconciling information from various data stores, and comparing the data against a regularly updated repository of patterns of commonly used hardware and software components. Enterprises with a complex and dynamic heterogeneous IT infrastructure with significant investments in virtua…
Technology Audits - published 24/04/2008 - Jasmine Kaur, Maxine Holt
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There was bated breath prior to the March Microsoft SharePoint conference but only limited release once the conference started as the anticipated big news around on-line services turned out to be little more than a minor advance. The company announced that it will be expanding its software plus services strategy by offering on-line versions of SharePoint and Exchange. It will also offer Microsoft Online Services to all sizes of businesses, and include on-line SharePoint and Exchange services in the offer…
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/04/2008 - Angela Eager
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In a recent OpinionWire article, Alan Rodger covered the launch of Windows Server 2008 (OpinionWire 6 March 2008 – The Long Wait for Longhorn is (Almost) Over). However, Alan did not comment on whether or not the long wait was worth it – is it?
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/04/2008 - Roy Illsley
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On 31 March (late in the evening in Europe) HP announced that it had signed a pre-bid agreement with TOWER Software to acquire the Australian Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendor. TOWER Software’s strength lies in its Document and Records Management (DRM) capabilities, although with the addition of Web Content Management (WCM) it has moved further into the ECM space, despite lacking some functions that the larger ECM vendors have added to their portfolios. The acquisition, which is expected to clos…
OpinionWire Articles - published 08/04/2008 - Sue Clarke
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The fact that IT and business processes are becoming ever closer can no longer be denied. In many industries many of the most critical business services cannot be supported without appropriate IT systems, marking high levels of ‘IT intensity’ (a measure of how pervasive IT is within organisations). This has made it more important than ever for a wide range of IT systems to be highly performant, always available, and to strongly protect information integrity. It is well understood that these demands lead …
White Papers - published 08/04/2008 - Alan Rodger
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Many on-line businesses are small in nature, with only a few employees and little technical expertise when it comes to implementing, maintaining, and using software solutions. It is also often difficult for organisations in the Small- to Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) market space to compete with larger enterprises when it comes to Web site design.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 28/03/2008 - Sue Clarke
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After much debate and probably a significant amount of internal company angst, Secure Computing has bitten the bullet and decided to streamline the branding of its core product set. This has no doubt been done in order to overcome current and future confusion, and to help to raise corporate awareness. It is something that the company had obviously struggled with whilst its product set consisted of Webwasher; IronMail; SafeWord; and of course the Sidewinder firewall. All of these are strong product offeri…
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/03/2008 - Andy Kellett
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