2011 was a very busy year for us at RampRate. I’ve spent nearly 20 years, on many sides, of the technology business and I enjoy reflecting across large swaths of time to see if there are patterns, lessons, and advice, so let’s see what we get from 2011.

Cloud Computing Won’t Whisk Us Away to Oz

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Posted in CDN & Streaming, Cloud Computing, Data Center & Colocation, Outsourcing Advisory, RampRate News | No Comments »

Like many, I look for reviews of products and services on the internet in order to help my buying decisions. And like many, I often find that there seem to be crazy rantings of people that populate otherwise stellar reviews for products and services of all types.

Where do these rantings come from? The screen shot below tells a pretty clear story (more…)

Posted in IT Market, Outsource/Insource, Outsourcing Advisory | No Comments »

In fairness to sellers of IT services, large buyers are not averse to a few power plays of their own and sometimes steamroll smaller or independent providers with onerous contract clauses. One of the most costly (if rare) provisions in relationships where the balance is tipped to the buyer is consequential damages — or the payment of fees / service credits scaled to the buyer’s business impact as opposed to the cost of the service itself. (more…)

Posted in Outsource/Insource, Outsourcing Advisory | 1 Comment »

IT outsourcing contracts are not naturally a zero sum game. Although the prospect of failure is very real, most of the time matching the right customer and offer is a win-win for buyer and seller alike. However, more often than not it plays out as a win-WIN scenario — with one side getting just a bit more of the pie than they deserve given their investment. Most of the time my job is to put the “capital W” in the buyer’s hands, but I’ve had a go at supplier strategy as well.

The real wins and losses are not determined in the top-line numbers that bubble up to executive summaries, but exist in the asterisks and fine print buried inside the master services agreement, order form, and service level agreement. My goal is to share tidbits from each side’s contractual playbook to show how innocent-looking terms can shift the balance in an outsourcing relationship and what you can do to either eliminate the imbalance or mitigate it through a compromise if the other side digs in.

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Posted in Outsource/Insource, Outsourcing Advisory | No Comments »