The Art of Negotiating Technology Contracts

This is the first in a series of articles with respect to negotiating contracts for technology transactions, such as software licenses, cloud transactions and business process or IT outsourcing deals. These products and services often are critical factors in a company’s success or failure, and recent technology failures by major institutions and companies, such as the rollout of healthcare.gov and data breaches at major retailers, underscore the need for effective agreements governing these deals.

Technology transactions are unique because they frequently involve a long-term relationship between the provider and the buyer. Thus, the contract must not only reflect the parties’ agreement, but it must also address anticipated changes, such as an increase or decrease in the volume of product or services being purchased, and also establish a framework for the parties to respond to unanticipated changes, such as changes in law, the nature of the buyer’s business, or advances in technology.
Read more at: The Art of Negotiating Technology Contracts

 

IBM termina el año con más de 40 centros cloud

La industria premia la nueva iniciativa de IBM de simplificar los contratos de cloud.

IBM abrirá 3 nuevos centros cloud, en las ciudades de México, Frankfurt y Tokio, que pasan a formar parte de la red de centros cloud de IBM en el mundo. Con estos son ya 40 los centros propios de IBM (entre los que se incluye el de España, en Cerdanyola del Vallés, Barcelona) que era el objetivo de la compañía para este 2014.

Lee más en: Computing-IBM termina el año con más de 40 centros cloud

3 Reasons It’s Time To Outsource IT Support To A Managed Services Provider

Supporting your IT in-house can be expensive, aggravating, and time-consuming. It’s challenging and costly for small businesses to maintain an IT department and stay current with the latest technology. Companies are seeing IT expenses continually increasing on a month to month basis, and training staff to perform IT tasks takes time away from focusing on work that generates revenue. As a result, growing businesses are beginning to take advantage of outsourcing their IT support to a managed services provider.

Not enough small and medium-sized businesses (SMB’s) understand the benefits of outsourcing. Aside from saving a significant amount of money, outsourcing IT support and managed services can provide a number of long-term benefits towards growth, scalability, and security into the future. We’re going to answer the three most important questions that decision-makers have about outsourcing their IT support through managed services.

Read more at: B2C-3 Reasons It’s Time To Outsource IT Support To A Managed Services Provider

Estudio sobre el Outsourcing de las TIC en España

Estudio sobre el Outsourcing de las TIC en España Whitelane Research, una organización independiente dedicada a la investigación de mercado, en colaboración con
la consultora multinacional Quint Wellington Redwood, han publicado los resultados de su estudio anual sobre el Outsourcing de las TIC y el desempeño de los proveedores de servicios en el mercado español.
Madrid, 17 de Diciembre de 2014 – Más de 135 participantes de las principales organizaciones, en relación al nivel de inversión y gasto en TIC, han evaluado más de 420 relaciones de Outsourcing en Tecnologías de la Información.
El estudio español forma parte de una serie de informes anuales sobre Outsourcing en las TI que realiza Whitelane Research, en los que entrevista a ejecutivos de las áreas de Finanzas y Tecnología (CIO y CFO) para conocer su opinión en relación a sus planes de Outsourcing y selección de proveedores de servicios. El estudio se lleva a cabo en 14 países europeos y el informe paneuropeo, publicado a finales del año, ofrece un resumen del panorama actual del Outsourcing en Europa.
Completan el informe las principales tendencias de sourcing, una clasificación de los mejores proveedores y un conjunto de
recomendaciones por parte de los 15 mejores proveedores.
Las principales conclusiones que se desprenden del estudio de este año, son las siguientes:

• El 84% de los encuestados han expresado su intención de mantener sus actuales planes de Outsourcing. De ellos, un 51% tiene previsto aumentarlo. Sólo un 5% declara tener prevista una reducción de sus niveles actuales de Outsourcing (Figura 1).
• Entre las razones para considerar una iniciativa de Outsourcing, la reducción de costes (citado por un 59%) es la razón principal por segundo año consecutivo (Figura 2). Sin embargo, la valoración de la importancia de este factor ha sufrido una importante disminución de 10 puntos; mientras que “la transformación del negocio” se ha incrementado en 20 puntos, una cifra considerable. Parece que los factores no financieros van cobrando importancia, lo que indica que el mercado va alcanzando mayor madurez y que el proveedor ha conseguido un mayor nivel de confianza en su capacidad para apoyar el
  crecimiento y la transformación del negocio.
• El nivel de satisfacción con los actuales proveedores de TI es alto. El 92% de los clientes se declara satisfecho con los actuales proveedores. Se ha producido un incremento del 1% en comparación con el año pasado (Figura 3).
• Accenture e Ibermática comparten el primer puesto en la clasificación general de proveedores de servicios con una puntuación del 81% (Figura 4). En este aspecto, el informe proporciona más detalles y clasifica a los proveedores por proceso y en base a nueve Indicadores Clave de Desempeño.
• Los encuestados también indicaron que todavía pueden hacer mayores esfuerzos en cuanto a su gobierno: uno de cada diez clientes está insatisfecho con sus propias capacidades de gobierno (Figura 5). Este año se ha realizado una encuesta adicional, en la cual, se ha entrevistado a los ejecutivos de los 15 mejores proveedores de servicios en España para
  preguntarles sobre sus clientes. La principal conclusión que se desprende de esta encuesta adicional es que dos de cada
  tres clientes podrían mejorar de forma significativa su gobierno y su gestión de transición y cambios (Figuras 6-9). El informe detallado ofrece recomendaciones adicionales sobre cómo los clientes pueden mejorar sus capacidades de gobierno.

En palabras de Antonio Crespo, director general de Quint, “después de unos años difíciles, en los que el coste ha sido prácticamente la única variable considerada en las decisiones de outsourcing, vemos cómo la transformación del negocio cobra más fuerza, lo que responde a una mayor conciencia sobre la importancia de las tecnologías de la información en todas las industrias”. Por su parte, Jef Loos, director general de Whitelane, destaca “el alto nivel de satisfacción de los clientes,en comparación con otros países europeos, lo cual, denota un alto nivel de cualificación de los profesionales en España, y una oportunidad manifiesta para prestar servicio desde España a otros países europeos, en los que el coste de la mano de obra es más alto”.

 

Mas información en : Estudio sobre el Outsourcing de las TIC en España

Leverage Service Design to Improve your SLAs

If you face challenges meeting your service support SLAs, the problem might lie in the way they’re designed. In this webinar, ITIL expert Anthony Orr will share strategies for improving alignment between your real capabilities and the agreements you create. You’ll learn how to:· Create synergies across all your service design process areas· Implement key concepts and templates to help you define better SLAs for your organization

· Employ lessons from real-life customer stories on bringing services to life

See WebCast at: Leverage Service Design to Improve your SLAs

 

Outsourcing and Google Apps vs Office 365 – The 2014 CIO review

A round-up of CIO attitudes towards outsourcing and IT vendors – as well as which are using Office 365 and which use Google Apps

Which organisations are using Google Apps and which are using Office 365? As well as reviewing the office productivity and collaboration suites CIOs are talking about, we round-up the attitudes towards outsourcing and vendors over the last year.

“We’ve done some sharp stuff around getting the volume from vendors and really looked at the clauses in contracts. For the last couple of years, every area of the organisation has had to cut targets, but it’s important to collaborate. So now the approach is to look at what the overall savings will be and what big-ticket saves will really change the organisation. There will be no growth in IT, but there will be investment in retooling and reducing complexity.”

See more at: CIO-Outsourcing and Google Apps vs Office 365 – The 2014 CIO review

 

Cloud Buyers’ Decision

This White Paper describes a Decision Tree that could be used to help you discover where Cloud
opportunities and solutions might fit in your organization. It is put forward for discussion, with the intentionPosts
that this discussion, and validation in the field, will result in a practical tool for use by enterprises.
In reverse mode, this Decision Tree can be used to quickly identify the types of business situations for which
a particular type of Cloud offering will deliver the most value.
Because there are likely to be exceptions to the principles on which this tool is based, it should not be used as
the sole source of guidance on Cloud fit. And because this tool only considers a granular set of business
requirements at a particular point in time, several iterations for each of numerous business situations would
be required to generate appropriate input to a corporate-level Cloud adoption strategy.
This Decision Tree White Paper describes:

• Ten decision nodes and the navigation through the nodes based on whether the response to each node is “yes” or “no
• The possible path through the nodes and fit recommendations for each path
• Solution considerations which refine and moderate the fit recommendations

Read more at: Cloud Buyers’ Decision Tree

Apply the Pareto Principle to Get the Most Out of Outsourcing

More than 100 years ago, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that 20% of the population in Italy owned 80% of the land, and that 20% of the pea pods held 80% of the peas in his garden.
Today, business owners everywhere rely on the Pareto principle to determine where to focus efforts and allocate funds.
For example, knowing that roughly 80% of sales come from 20% of their customers, astute business owners and sales managers will determine which clients and prospects should receive focused attention from sales reps.

Read more at : Business2Community-Apply the Pareto Principle to Get the Most Out of Outsourcing

 

TIM Brasil signs outsourcing deal with NTT

TIM Brasil signs outsourcing deal with NTT

TIM Brasil has signed two contracts for managed services with NTT Data, for a period of three years. One involves applications operations involving management of problems and incidents, events and requests, service level, IT capability and availability, as well as covering operation management, service catalogue, changes and knowledge. Another is focused on infrastructure, with services for database, network, technical rooms, middleware, automation, Unix / Linux and Windows. NTT Data is the IT services company of Japanese operator NTT.

2014 IT Outsourcing in Review: Grading CIO.com Predictions

Around this time last year, CIO.com and its outsourcing experts made some wide-ranging predictions for IT services. We said this would be the year that robots began taking over IT service jobs. (Not exactly.) We said that a new hybrid offshoring model would gain favor. (It did.) And we predicted the mass repatriation of work from third parties back onshore or in-house. (That didn’t happen.)

We revisited all of our prognostications from last year and found that this year a record number of five were right on target, two were off base and three were just beginning to take shape at year-end. As we pull together our 2014 forecast for 2015, here’s how those 2013 predictions for 2014 turned out.

Read it all at: CIO-2014 IT Outsourcing in Review: Grading Our Predictions