Stan Gibson

Weve heard of products as a service—such as buying installation and scheduled upgrades along with desktop systems for a flat fee—but what about services as a product? Everyone—both customers and providers—wants to get away from the big, monolithic deal in which the provider spends a lot of time and trouble on one-off, specialized implementations. Such […]

MOSCOW, Russian Federation—In the global software jungle, it doesnt help to be small. Despite growing at 30 percent per year in many cases, Russian software makers are often unknown and in danger of being trampled in the stampede to send work to India. At the Russoft conference here on June 1, software makers based in […]

On the heels of the WinHEC conference May 23-25 in Seattle, Microsoft is poised at a critical juncture in its Vista rollout cycle. The company has just released specific hardware requirements for Vistas many flavors and, barring a sudden schedule change, will soon distribute Beta 2 to 2 million people as a prelude to the […]

Offering up a specialized service designed to cut out inefficiencies in corporate IT systems, Hewlett-Packard announced May 24 its HP IT Shared Service portfolio. The purpose of the service is to rearchitect systems so that IT functions can be consolidated on fewer systems and then served up across an enterprise through a service-oriented architecture software […]

Its commencement time across U.S. college campuses, following which, many graduates will be packing up and heading off to their first jobs. One hundred grads will be heading off to Mysore, India, in August to begin four to six months of training at Infosys education center. When their training is done, theyll head back to […]

Brian Keane, president and CEO of IT services firm Keane Inc., resigned May 10 amid unspecified employee allegations relating to his personal conduct. The Boston-based outsourcing provider announced that the companys board of directors and Keane, whose father, John Keane, founded the company in 1965 and is chairman of the board, agreed on the decision. […]

Kraft Foods will hand over its worldwide IT infrastructure to Electronic Data Systems in a seven-year, $1.7 billion outsourcing deal. Covered under the contract are data centers, hosting, telecommunications and workplace support. EDS will take over approximately 670 Kraft workers. “World-class information technology is critical to Krafts long-term business success. Our strategy is to have […]

During the California gold rush, it was said that the only people who made fortunes were those who sold picks and shovels to the prospectors. During the current globe rush, vendors and consultants are similarly aiming to cash in, either by assisting companies in the globalization process as consultants and aggregators or by selling software […]

Reflecting a quarter of strong profits, IBMs board of directors boosted the companys quarterly dividend by 50 percent, to 30 cents per common share, up from 20 cents per share in the previous quarter. The jump was the largest per-share quarterly dividend increase in the companys history, according to IBM. The announcement came April 25 […]

Deep inside, we all realize that the battle for secure computing will never be over. Still, the price that must be paid to keep our data safe and our e-businesses operating can seem daunting. Once weve succeeded in protecting ourselves from one threat, another emerges, requiring diligence, creativity and expense to combat. In the latest […]

Satyam Computer Systems joined the club of billion-dollar companies, as the Indian outsourcing firm posted strong results for its fourth quarter and its fiscal year, which ended March 31. Satyam, headquartered in Hyderabad, India, recorded $1.1 billion for the year and earned profit of $249 million, a growth rate of 37 percent over the previous […]

Theres no doubt about it. Were in the midst of a globe rush. No company wants to describe itself as anything other than “global,” and with good reason. Theres plenty of evidence that agile sourcing from many worldwide locations can give any business an edge. From the auto industry to Wal-Mart to Dell, companies that […]