Basman | Explore: IT Outsourcing

HP announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to purchase Bitfone Corp., a privately held global software and services company that develops software solutions for mobile device management for the wireless industry.

The acquisition is part of HP’s strategy to grow its mobile enterprise business. Acquiring Bitfone will strengthen HP’s ability to provide customers with a flexible, modular approach to building a mobile infrastructure by allowing them to choose what they need to meet their business needs.

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EDS is developing a middleware, messaging and security platform for Deutsche Lufthansa AG based on an application development and integration services contract awarded to EDS at the end of the second quarter of 2006.

This platform serves as the basis of the Lufthansa Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), enabling Lufthansa the ability to interface, interoperate and integrate with Lufthansa business partners and other airline systems through open standards.

The development of the application is slated for the end of December and the platform will be ready for acceptance and integration by Lufthansa in January 2007.

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Intelligroup launched today its Testing Practice with a focus on ERP testing. The firm has also recently signed a partnership agreement with Compuware which includes becoming a Reseller of Compuware Testing products.

Intelligroup Testing services build upon the ERP best practices and tools that Intelligroup has perfected in the SAP and Oracle arena. The focus is on more effective requirements and impact analysis; preventing defects from moving through the development life cycle; and a metrics program that is useful to both the project manager and senior management. Intelligroup already provides Testing services in ERP, as well as, web and other applications.

Intelligroup currently provides both manual and automated Testing services for clients in Life Sciences, Consumer Products, and High Tech industry verticals. Capabilities include Functional, Regression, Stress, and User Acceptance testing for both ERP and web applications built on Java and .Net.

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Workday, Inc., founded in March 2005 by Dave Duffield and a recognized team of ERP veterans, makes its debut today, introducing Workday Enterprise Business Services™, the first in a new generation of on-demand ERP solutions, and the general availability of its first suite, Workday Human Capital Management™.  Taking a fresh, modern approach, the company aims to provide mid- to large-sized companies with a compelling alternative to traditional enterprise software. The launch, to be held in a webcast today at 10 a.m. Pacific Time, also includes an announcement of the company’s initial customers and business partners.

Duffield has a successful track record of building companies and creating new markets for business software. He founded PeopleSoft, Inc., which became known as the popular leader in its category in the 1990s, as well as three other successful business software companies. He co-founded Workday with Aneel Bhusri, a long-time colleague and executive at PeopleSoft.

“The combination of today’s dynamic business environment and major technology advancements has offered us a great opportunity to create a new breed of ERP—one that is not beholden to aging technologies and business models,” said Dave Duffield, CEO and co-founder.  “In addition to the initial availability of Workday Human Capital Management, we are pleased to be announcing our first two production customers and an important set of strategic partnerships.”

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Infosys Technologies Ltd. today announced that 148 professionals have achieved certification for The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF™ 8), resulting in the largest number of professionals with this accreditation at any one company in the world. The Open Group is a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium focused on open standards and global interoperability within and between enterprises.

Sohel Aziz, EMEA Head for Technology Consulting at Infosys commented: “TOGAF is the most important and well adopted standard for developing and implementing enterprise architecture activities. Our commitment to The Open Group’s TOGAF standards ensures we have the skills, capabilities and processes to enable our customers to execute and govern Enterprise Architecture to derive tangible business value.”

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IBM today announced that a dozen key India-based solution providers will incorporate IBM’s self-managing autonomic technology into their software and solutions. By working with IBM, these companies can deliver software that can radically automate and simplify IT management and underlying systems, while reducing costs for their customers.

The India-based solution providers will build IBM self-managing technology into their offerings over the next six months as part of IBM’s global Autonomic Computing Business Partner initiative. As the first Indian solution providers to adopt IBM’s autonomic technology, this signals a new era of computing in India, where other technology firms are turning to IBM to help develop systems with built-in intelligence to reduce IT complexity for customers. IBM estimates that autonomic technologies can reduce IT administration costs by up to 40 percent and increase IT utilization by up to 25 percent.

“Autonomic computing has risen to the top of the IT agenda for businesses in India,” said Mr. R. Dhamodaran, vice president for ISV and Developer Relations, IBM India. “IBM is helping solution providers quickly adopt self-managing autonomic technology, which is critical for customers trying to cut costs and remain competitive. In turn, as solution providers build IBM’s autonomic technology into their offerings they spur customer demand for products based on IBM middleware.”

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Oftentimes, discussions around SOA focus more on technical and development issues. This first in a series of Consultants’ Roundtable podcasts delves into the business value of SOA.

Selling SOA economics inside of enterprises today is as important as executing on SOA deployments. Both business leaders and IT leaders are learning how to begin the short- and long-term cost benefit analysis for SOA. It’s complicated—and it varies from company to company.

To learn more, Dana Gardner, president and principal analyst for Interarbor Solutions and host of his own Briefings Direct podcast series, brings together two HP Services executives in a high-level discussion on how to make the business case for SOA.

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HP unveiled three facilities in Cupertino, Calif., Singapore and Bangalore, India, as part of a $500 million investment to deliver world-class service-oriented architecture (SOA) to enterprise customers.

Introduced at the HP Technology Forum, the three HP SOA Competency Centers are comprehensive experience centers enabling HP, its customers and its partners to pilot and evaluate SOA technologies, solutions and implementations. The centers will also showcase HP’s capabilities in IT architecture, management, security and governance.

SOA is an approach to delivering IT services in a secure and manageable way that uses loosely connected, reusable and standards-based technology that can be quickly aligned to changing business needs.

HP’s SOA offering, supported by the new centers and a key component of HP’s Adaptive Enterprise strategy, takes advantage of leading infrastructure technology to deliver IT as a service, building towards an automated, 24×7, “lights-out” computing environment.

The opening of the three SOA Competency Centers brings HP’s total to five worldwide, with two additional centers located in Sophia Antipolis, France, and Tokyo.

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I’m scanning twiceaday - early in the morning and late in the evening - all press releases and news of about 60 corporate sites. Most of the time I have to do this work manually  because these sites are organized awfully. I ask you sincerely, dear press officers of the multinational mega corporations, how is it possible (and why is it necessary in your opinion) to deliver press releases in PDF format? Or to hide them deep in your sites where I have to click 5-6 times to reach them?

Recently Todd Zeigler made a discussion roundup of ways to improve newspaper websites. Mostly all of what he recaps in his list is true for press releases, too! Sometimes I believe press officers have never heard of the internet or any digital revolution yet … Everybody who releases a message to the press today in a PDF format should be divided in to four parts after being tarred and feathered!

Here is a urgent and important todo list for press officers (inspired by Todd):

1. Get rid of all registration
2. Provide full text RSS feeds (suitable for feed readers and news aggregators)
3. Start using tags
4. Use links in your text to relevant content
5. Implement a news ticker on your frontpage
6. Work with external “social” websites (like weblogs etc)
7. Offer alternative views of your content
8. Modernize your site’s graphic design
9. Learn from Craigslist
10. Make your content work on cell phones and PDAs
11. Allow readers to comment on every story
12. Improve search features
13. Use better and cleaner HTML (suite of evaluation tools here)
14. Open up your archives
15. Provide multilingual Versions
16. Offer supplemental content
17. Open up the letter to the editor process

Do your homework! Hey, we are already in the Third Millennium!

[Hat tip for Heiko Hebig for the link to Todd's post]

The following news is not about “IT Outsourcing” but about technology and open source.  I believe, this will tremendously affect the “IT Outsourcing” and BPO business and its calculations in the future:

According to a newly released IDC study, the open source software phenomenon has spread far beyond Linux and is gaining enormous momentum. The study, which analyzed IDC surveys from over 5,000 developers in 116 countries, finds that developers worldwide are increasing their use of open source. The study declares that open source software represents the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s. IDC believes that open source will eventually play a role in the life-cycle of every major software category, and will fundamentally change the value proposition of packaged software for customers.

“The use of open source beyond Linux is pervasive, used by almost three-quarters of organizations and spanning hundreds of thousands of projects,” said Dr. Anthony Picardi, senior vice president of Global Software Research at IDC. “Although open source will significantly reduce the industry opportunity over the next ten years, the real impact of open source is to sustain innovations in mature software markets, thus extending the useful life of software assets and saving customers money.”

The study finds that of the 5,000 survey respondents, open source software is being used by 71% of the developers in the world and is in production at 54% of their organizations. In addition, half of the global developers claim that the use of open source is increasing in their organizations.

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