Archive for the ‘Managed Services’ Category

One of the hottest topics in the wake of the meltdown of the real estate market is the ethics of walking away from an underwater mortgage – which now accounts for 12% of all foreclosures according to Morgan Stanley.

Banks and realtors tend to opine that it’s a barbarian practice, only acceptable to those that are rich and ruthless, with Fannie Mae and Congress taking specific punitive steps based on whether a default was voluntary and bloggers calling for life-long branding of defaulters.

Consumer advocates and academics reply that a strategic default is not a moral decision, but simply repairs a long-standing asymmetry between personal social norms (“honor your financial obligations”) and business norms (“maximize returns”) that allows banks to play by a different set of rules and take advantage of their customers. (more…)

Posted in IT Market, Managed Services | No Comments »

Driving in Detroit’s Rut, is the Media Business Next?

By Tony Greenberg /Alex Veytsel

Media firms have been my clients for years. Most IT firms complain that media firms prey on IT services firms by offering to “reference them” for larger enterprise deals. WRONG. Media firms, much like adult entertainment firms, are the spaghetti slingers and early adopters of new tech. You have to love them for taking the arrows in their backs and mounting themselves on the fireplace altar as trophies.

Media firms are actually IT Heroes. While banks and automakers wax poetic about risk and return on investment, Disney, ABC, News Corp., Viacom, CBS, and Sony–all past or current clients–pave the yellow brick road. Hats off to you all for “boldly going where no man has gone before”. For now, let’s ponder what lessons we can learn from the carnage of auto and the future demise of IT. (more…)

Posted in Data Center & Colocation, IT Market, Managed Services, Uncategorized | No Comments »

I always have thought of Microsoft as Open Source in many ways. I know it may sound odd on several fronts, especially for a guy like me who has been using UNIX flavored operating systems since the early 1980s.

But I’ve also been using PC-Windows and Apple Macintoshes since the early 1980s, so I think my views are informed by a pretty wide set of data sources. (more…)

Posted in Cloud Computing, Managed Services | 3 Comments »

Rigged Managed Services RFPs Harm Vendors and Buyers Alike

As a seller of IT managed services, you may spend hundreds of hours on a quote only to find that you really had no chance because the game was rigged. It can be obvious and heavy handed: (more…)

Posted in Managed Services | 1 Comment »

Today’s devious device is a playbook page that’s intentionally left blank. Omitting meaningful measurement from IT Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or leaving them to the discretion of the vendor can effectively nullify their effect along with service credits of 2%-5% of your monthly bill for a single violation up to 50% or more for serious / repeat violations (more…)

Posted in CDN & Streaming, Data Center & Colocation, Managed Services | 4 Comments »