Brazil vs. India: It’s a Whole Different Ballgame
February 3rd, 2012Benjamin Quadros, CEO of BRQ, on why the desire to do business in Brazil differs from India.
NEARSHORE NEXUS: Why It’s “Invitation Only”
January 19th, 2012By Kirk Laughlin
As a young media organization, we’re obviously very proud to be staging our second annual Nearshore Nexus 
conference, coming up April 19 in New York City. There are lots of exciting features around the show (great speakers, sponsors, venue, and entertainment), but what I want to share here is why we’re making it “invitation only.”
Nearshore Nexus is specifically engineered to host an audience where more than 70% of attendees will be carefully reviewed outsourcing customers – people who call the shots and sign the deals for their corporations.
Nearshore Nexus 2012: Bigger, Bolder and Coming to Broadway
January 11th, 2012The most exclusive outsourcing event of the year comes to New York City, April 19. Buy-side executives (including vendor management, IT, BPO, site selection and software leaders) are invited to attend.
Ray Wang on the Consumerization of IT
December 5th, 2011Nearshore is a place for partnerships, driving innovation and intelligence that fits well with the consumerization trend, says analyst Ray Wang, of Constellation Research
What If My Enterprise is Reluctant to Outsource?
June 14th, 2011“This is not just about cutting costs. You are looking at partners who can expand your capabilities,” says Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research during his recent presentation at Nearshore Nexus 2011. Wang challenges CIO and IT leaders to take advantage of disruptions in IT services by capitalizing on the value of third-party outsourcers.
Sourcing in Brazil Means Competing with the Government
April 13th, 2011One CIO’s experience vying for talent and finding ‘much, much better’ results than India
By Dennis Barker
Imagine trying to staff up for an offshore project and every time you think you’ve got someone about to join the team, that person decides to take a job somewhere else.
That was the biggest and most annoying problem Chris Snyder ran into while working with a Nearshore IT provider. Snyder, director of IT services and CIO for Hulcher Services, getting the team from 80% to 100% staffing was the thing that kept him awake at night. “It might sound like a minor thing,” he says, “but it happened a number of times where we’d have a candidate we really liked tell us near the end of the hiring process, ‘Sorry, I’m taking a job with someone else.’ And that someone else was usually the government.”
CIO View: Straight Talk on Latin America Telecom Reliability
February 3rd, 2011Former CIO of Stream: Be careful that low-cost markets don’t mean low-performing telecom
By Tarun George
What happens when your Latin America delivery center phone lines go down? A few markets in the region are still not fully privatized while others have only begun to make networks redundant.
We sat down with Bob Lyons, who has managed ICT strategies and operations for Stream Global Services (as CIO), Avaya and Convergys, and has in-depth experience of the telecom market in Latin America. He tells us what the pain points are in LatAm ICT, and how firms can still maintain a reliable network. Read on for more.
The Contrarian: A Modest Offshoring Proposal
December 3rd, 2010By George Tillmann
“The biggest weakness I think we have in America is we have forgotten the long term”, says Larry Fink the founder and CEO of BlackRock, Inc., the world’s largest asset management company. A similar sentiment can be heard from Warren Buffett, the quintessential investor. What does this have to do with offshoring? Offshoring is, I believe, a perfectly acceptable method for cost management – usually. I say usually, because in our current situation, offshoring’s short-term gains could have undesirable long-term consequences.
The Perils of “Multi-sourcing” for the CIO
January 7th, 2010Multisourcing spreading work among several service providers, can offer many advantages to IT shops, from competitive pricing and increased flexibility to access to a deeper pool of talent. But working with multiple vendors can also mean exit costs are multiplied if the arrangement doesn’t work out, warns Bob Mathers, principal consultant with Compass Management Consulting.
“The problem is that the cost to exit any single small deal is not that different from the cost to exit one big deal,” Mathers says. “As such, while multi-sourcing can potentially optimize flexibility and responsiveness, the costs of transitioning multiple agreements can be paralyzing.”
The end-of-life complications for a multi-sourced environment are no different than a single-sourced deal. They include resolving contractual issues, knowledge transfer costs, software licensing fees, re-training and start-up costs for the new deal, and the expense of internal resources needed …
Do You Really Want Your Sourcing Provider to be an Adversary?
January 7th, 2010By Kirk Laughlin, Editorial Director
One of the most heated, contentious and downright uncomfortable places outsourcers and their customers frequently find themselves is on the battleground of contract negotiations. Ever been part of one of these slugfests?
More than a few smart people in this industry have observed the sheer insanity of a customer beating on the head of a service provider while blissfully lacking recognition that the drive to lower cost may well have a direct impact on the quality of service delivery back to the customer. Outsource providers may have ruled the day ten years ago during the early growth years of the industry, but the pendulum has swung the other way in recent years, explains Richard Sandler, Vice President of Contracts for CSC’s Managed Services Sector, who has global responsibility for Contracts Management of all of CSC’s commercial outsourcing accounts.
I spoke to Richard recently about how much both sides of the outsourcing relationships are identifying innovation as a key goal on the roadmap toward a sustainable, fulfilling engagement. Sandler says that the “procurement mentality” still reigns in many customer organizations, pointing out that this approach can be quite damaging in the services sector where high value strategic contributions and mindshare are, in the end, what the end customer or business unit is really looking for. “The only way they can relate to procurement is to beat down on the vendors,” says Sandler. “For suppliers like us, we have a global infrastructure. It behooves both companies to work in a non-adversarial way.”
