Monthly Archive:: May 2016

What Does the CSC & HP Merger Mean for the Services Industry?

Two of the three titans of the asset-intensive infrastructure services business are merging. What does this mean for the services industry? Let’s start with why they’re merging. Clearly, the space that they occupy is a mature space. It has been undergoing tremendous competitive pressure from the Indian firms with their Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM

A Key Factor in the CIO’s Ability to Drive Change

I recently met with a major player in the Internet of Things (IoT) space, and the company is incredibly frustrated with how developments are evolving. They pointed out the promise of the IoT but said it’s not evolving much beyond the use case of predictive maintenance. It seems people are In Denial (ID). Why

Service Providers Face the End of Enterprise Infrastructure Function

In the new world we’re moving into, where we have a high degree of automation and hyper-scale data centers, cloud, SaaS and re-usage, why do companies even have an IT infrastructure function or department? As companies integrate their software-defined ops function with their software development function, creating DevOps, they no longer need an IT

What I Learned at Infosys Confluence 2016

Infosys graciously asked me and many others to join its thought-leadership summit (Infosys Confluence 2016) in San Francisco in late April. As the event promos stated, the summit was intended to discuss how to leverage technology to create a future different from the past of doing more of the same. Here’s what I learned.

Are You Paying too Much for Outsourced Resources?

CIOs need to check for “outsourcing bloat.” Many companies in mature, offshore, FTE-based outsourcing environments experience substantial bloat. From our knowledge of our clients’ situations and our research for companies seeking objective data to help them determine the return on investment in outsourcing, it’s clear that many companies today are paying too much for

CIO Focus Needs to Shift from Cutting IT Costs

CIOs and IT departments need a new cost emphasis beyond slashing their own costs. Put your own house in order before you start giving advice to others is a popular idiom. And CIOs have been doing that for years, incrementally cutting costs in IT functions. But what if the mandate from your CEO is

Why Service Level Agreements are Dead

Service-level agreement (SLA) contracts can drive the wrong business outcomes. Some technology leaders want to move away from those SLA-driven contracts. If you’re like many CIOs, the chances are your company compensates third-party IT service providers for something they didn’t do or pays them twice for something. Technology leader Nipa Chakravarti realized that’s what