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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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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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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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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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When speaking with vendors, the most widely cited risk that can cause a project to fail is a failure to clearly state the objectives. In many cases the project will be the implementation of a new application or system, where a poor implementation that results in a system that is not optimised, can leave the organisation in a worse position than if it had not put in the new system at all. Whilst there are other reasons for the failure of a project, such as reluctance on the part of end-users to use the sy…
OpinionWire Articles - published 11/03/2008 - Sue Clarke
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Diligenta, the UK-based Financial Services Authority (FSA)-regulated subsidiary of IT services Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), recently announced the award of its second deal, just two years after it was newly established in order to take over closed-book business and IT operations at Life and Pensions (L&P) insurance company Pearl Group.
OpinionWire Articles - published 18/02/2008 - Alan Rodger
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UK companies are failing to use IT to reduce and to improve their environmental sustainability, even though they believe that technology is key to tackling the problem.
TECHwatch Articles - published 06/02/2008 - Datamonitor Analysts
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A Masters-level program backed by universities and employers has been set up to fast-track the careers of IT professionals in the UK.
TECHwatch Articles - published 06/02/2008 - Datamonitor Analysts
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In some ways, passing from one year into another is almost indiscernible when it comes to the general capabilities within the outsourcing market place. Unlike the world of software, there are no major new releases of products marking the calendar gone by, or ahead, and no ‘leaps forward’ in architecture to prompt debate about the relative merits of change.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 29/01/2008 - Alan Rodger
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GlassHouse Technologies provides a number of services that help organisations to manage their IT infrastructures, addressing issues such as a lack of reporting tools or an ability to analyse or interpret the results, a lack of skills or coverage, lack of service levels, and the management of policies and processes. Many organisations do not have the resources either in terms of skills or people to adequately manage their IT infrastructures. An advantage of the GlassHouse approach is that its tools are ha…
Technology Audits - published 18/12/2007 - Sue Clarke
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The leading outsourcing advisory company, TPI, recently discussed its analysis of the market position at the end of the year’s third quarter, covering outsourcing deals with a value of over €40 million. Although TPI does not advise on outsourcing deals with the public sector, its quarterly calls provide analysts with a valuable insight into the state of the high-end outsourcing arena in different global regions.
OpinionWire Articles - published 29/10/2007 - Alan Rodger
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It was reported last week that the Indian Rupee had strengthened further so that now US$1 was worth just INR39.32 (making UK£1 worth approximately INR80.4). The rupee has risen around 12% against the US dollar in the last 12 months, and the expectation is that the outsourcing providers based in India, which service organisations in the west, will be worst affected.
OpinionWire Articles - published 18/10/2007 - Maxine Holt
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CSC Covansys is a discrete part of the giant global service provider CSC, which aims to maximise the advantage to customers of using offshore resources in India to fulfil their IT and business process needs. Large, well-established Western providers have had to respond to the success of the model of using India-based resources – in CSC’s case to greatly increase the size of its existing Indian workforce by acquiring Covansys, which has the majority of its resources based in India. Organisations with a pe…
Technology Audits - published 16/10/2007 - Alan Rodger
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Lawson Opportunity Analyzer (OA) is a service from Lawson Software, aimed at helping customers align their IT strategy (in terms of enterprise application deployment) with business objectives. Historically, the deployment of applications such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has been a hit and miss affair, with relatively few delivering real, measurable success rates. OA helps by working with executives and process owners in a top-down/bottom-up manner to map, target, and then plan which business ob…
Technology Audits - published 09/10/2007 - Teresa Jones
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I started out in IT as a humble analyst programmer, more years ago than I care to remember, developing systems in languages such as COBOL and Assembler. We had long windows overnight for batch updates of systems, any Service Level Agreements (SLAs) were determined by the IT department, and any changes to systems were met with timescale estimates also by the IT department, with business needs some way down the list.
However times have changed, with businesses and customers expecting systems to be availab…
OpinionWire Articles - published 27/09/2007 - Maxine Holt
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It was reported earlier this week that the UK’s Automobile Association (AA) has given notice that it will terminate its UK£50 million, seven-year, IT infrastructure outsourcing deal with IBM. This follows the AA’s UK£6.2 billion merger with the UK-based holiday and insurance services provider Saga, which was given EU approval earlier this month.
OpinionWire Articles - published 27/09/2007 - Maxine Holt
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With the rise in Software as a Service (SaaS) applications – ranging from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to desktop applications – one could be forgiven for thinking that you can just sign up to use them and away you go. Whilst on an individual level this may be the case, for organisations of all shapes and sizes it is still highly likely that services will still be needed to ensure that the deployment runs smoothly.
OpinionWire Articles - published 20/09/2007 - Teresa Jones
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