The Mobile User Experience: Know Your Audience (Part Two)
March 3rd, 2012Ci&T’s head of mobile strategy talks about how to deal with the many flavors of mobile app development.
Outsourcing Clients Face Tough Choice: White Box or Black Box?
February 21st, 2012
By Dan Berthiaume
Most IT outsourcing and BPO relationships boil down to one of two models: staff augmentation or managed services. “Staff augmentation is where the client defines a specific skill and pays the provider based on the number of hours and days successfully worked,” explains Dave Borowski, senior associate of outsourcing advisory firm Pace Harmon. “There are service levels, but you still pay by the number of hours and bodies.”
And while staff augmentation is currently more popular with clients, particularly in the case of BPO, there is a shift toward more adoption of the managed services approach.
Maersk Counts on IT Outsourcing to Spur Growth, Flexibility
February 20th, 2012By Dan Berthiaume
Operating in 100 countries and transporting goods around the globe, at first glance it would appear Danish shipping company Maersk Line is already handling all the cargo it can manage. But when Maersk determined that the volume of most of the goods it was shipping had not grown to full capacity, the company decided information technology outsourcing (ITO) would be a crucial part of rectifying the situation.
Nearshore’s 2012 Outlook: Time for Industry to ‘Stand on Its Own’
January 18th, 2012
By Patrick Haller
With 2012 in full-swing, a critical look at what lies ahead for Nearshoring is in order. With a shaky global economy, and some forecasts calling for a sluggish year in IT and BPO sourcing, this is no time to be complacent. Whether it’s building solid skill sets, creating sufficient scale, matching client’s expectations, managing expansion, or doing business amidst social change and myopic political theater, providers have a lot to confront. We tapped some of the leading experts in the Nearshoring space for their answer to the burning question: What is the single biggest challenge you think the Nearshore outsourcing industry faces in 2012?
Half of Outsourcing Customers Won’t Depend on Current IT Outsourcers to Manage Private Cloud
December 12th, 2011By Bob Scheier
IT outsourcing (ITO) vendors provide everything from application development and testing to remote management of customers’ data centers. As those customers adopt cloud computing (highly virtualized compute, storage and network capacity provided over the Internet) ITO vendors face both strategic threats and opportunities, according to a survey of 489 business executives conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) this spring.
New cloud competitors include IAAS (infrastructure as a service) vendors such as Rackspace, who sell server, network and storage capacity on an “as needed” basis, as well as vendors such as Dell and HP looking to move beyond product sales to higher-margin services.
Mexico Climbs to Sixth Place in Global Outsourcing Ranking
December 7th, 2011Mexico recently rose five spots to become the sixth-ranked country worldwide in A.T. Kearney’s 2011 Global Services Location Index, boosted by depreciation in its currency and “increased nearshoring sentiment in the United States.” Now the highest-ranked Latin American country in the index, wages in Mexico fell 18 percent in dollar terms last year “as it was buffeted by economic headwinds from the United States,” according to A.T. Kearney’s summary of the index.
Hybrid Cloud Starts to Change the Economics of IT Outsourcing
November 10th, 2011Many vendors still have ” significant gaps in cloud delivery platforms and skillsets”
By Dan Berthiaume
Infrastructure delivery based on the cloud has the potential to deliver enterprise-level value and flexibility that could lead to disruptive adoption by IT outsourcing customers. By improving utilization and eliminating excess capacity, Everest Group is among several leading industry groups that advise cloud infrastructure models can deliver significant cost efficiencies, particularly “hybrid” models combining the usage of public and private, dedicated clouds.
Inter-American Development Bank Awards Uruguay Loan for Services
October 28th, 2011
IDB launches first loan program targeted at outsourcing services in LatAm
By Patrick Haller
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) will provide a loan of ten million dollars, plus three million dollars that will be contributed by the Uruguayan government, in order to foster further development of the nation’s services sector. The IDB office focused on integration and the trade sector in the Southern Cone is based in Montevideo and this helped to promote the regular and fluid interaction between Uruguayan authorities and the IDB representative, and established a permanent dialogue from the very beginning of the loan process.
Capobianco: Exporting is not the same as selling to internal markets
By Patrick Haller
South America is not a single country. Just like in North America, Asia, Africa and other continents, the cultural dynamics and considerations vary from nation to nation, and within the different regions of each country. Javier Peña Capobianco, General Secretary for the Asociación Latinoamericana de Exportadores de Servicios (ALES), and a lecturer on the subject of International Trade in Services at the Catholic University of Uruguay, helped explain some of the misperceptions and the rise of Latin American countries on the global stage.
Nearshore Americas’ IT and BPO Conference Nearshore Nexus Reveals All-Star Speaker Lineup
December 16th, 2010NEW YORK, Dec 16, 2010 — Nearshore Americas, the premier online source for professional outsourced services decision-makers, has announced an all-star speaker lineup at its Nearshore Nexus Conference, the first executive-level conference dedicated to the rapidly expanding Nearshore business services industry. Nearshore Nexus, taking place April 26, 2011, features Johnson & Johnson, Axis Capital, J. Walter Thompson, Capgemini and other top industry luminaries presenting valuable insights and practical use cases on nearshoring success.
Go to Nearshore Nexus Now to Register. April 26, 2011 at the Jersey City, Hyatt. Qualifying buy-side attendees are invited to attend free of charge.
Nearshore Nexus is the first event in the global outsourcing ecosystem, created to bring together senior technologists, CIOs, global sourcing decision makers, country representatives and select sponsors to explore the “New Axis of Outsourcing.” General session …
