outsourcing: smaller is better

Outsourcing is back on the CIO’s agenda. However, deals are smaller in scope than before, contracts more aggressively negotiated and are frequently tied into creating business value.

Last year was a tough one for the IT industry. Gartner said that enterprise technology spending fell 5.2% last year, compared to 2008. Although budgets are set to grow again this year (by 3.3%), the analyst company said they will not grow in real terms, and that spending will only hit 2008 levels in 2012.
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a community approach to cloud computing

The cloud computing sector was set abuzz earlier this year, when IDC analyst Jeanne Capachin said that three banks were uniting to experiment on a joint cloud computing initiative. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia was reported to be working with international banking partners on a purchasing alliance that would use its buying power to force down prices on IT equipment, and encourage the take up of shared applications within the cloud. So how feasible is the concept of sharing cloud resources among like-minded partners in reality?

In a speech to the Committee for Economic Development in Australia, Michael Harte, the CIO for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia said that the bank spends almost $500 million on infrastructure a year, but only $150 million on customer interactivity...
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a 360° view of customer care

Outstanding customer care is a prerequisite these days. Users of advanced communications services need total visibility and control over their services anytime, anywhere. Key to delivering this are web-based tools, which are now the industry standard for solution and service management.

To meet these needs, Orange Business Services last year launched My Service Space to replace its legacy portals Webvision and eCSC. All customers will be migrated over to the new portal by the end of summer 2010, with the legacy systems phased out by the end of the year. As it stands, 90% have already migrated to My Service Space, leaving just those on Business Everywhere, CIC and Network Boost to make the move...
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defeat the Conficker worm with security-as-a-service

Last year 7 million IP addresses in China were infected with the Conficker worm, amounting to a quarter of the global total. These figures, from China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT), highlight the wide reach of malware inside the country.

Conficker is a particularly virulent worm. It usually infects a massive number of Windows systems in each outbreak and often results in significant losses. It propagates through the network and USB drives, and will attempt to obtain administrator's credentials to further compromise other computers which in turn will act as zombies to form a botnet to launch distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. This raises the risk that confidential information might be leaked to unauthorized parties. In addition, the company's IT assets would be used to attack other targets, leading to further liabilities of the damages caused.
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Case study: DSM

DSM is a global life sciences and materials sciences company with headquarters in the Netherlands. It deployed a fully-managed global videoconferencing solution – audio/video/streaming content service – on the Orange Telepresence-enabled network This videoconferencing solution has made a significant contribution to DSM meeting its sustainability objectives, particularly by facilitating the world’s largest ever global virtual meeting for 400 top managers – five locations, three continents, one virtual meeting!
>> Read about it in this case study