Practical insights on technology, sourcing, cloud, and emerging technology.
IT Outsourcing Risk 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… Read More »IT Outsourcing Risk – Consequential Damages
February 25, 2010
Managed Services Supplier Playbook: Why IT Buyers Should Worry at Budget Time One of the newer trends that came about as the dollar has weakened in the last few years is the prevalence of currency adjustment clauses in contracts with a remote / offshore component. These are typically buried in some appendix along with CPI… Read More »Managed Services supplier Playbook – Currency Risk
February 19, 2010
Green Grid Virtualization Whitepaper In the recent Green Grid White Paper, “Impact of Virtualization on Data Center Physical Infrastructure“, there’s an interesting discussion about the impact of virtualization on data center density, capacity, and power waste. However, most of the findings apply to in-house environments where the same entity that virtualizes has to deal with… Read More »Perspectives on Green Grid Virtualization Whitepaper
February 10, 2010
Cloud Computing Those who live where it snows are all too familiar with the crazed weather forecasting phenomenon. Recently there were reports of 18-36” of snow where I live. Stores were emptied out, gas stations and lines, and everyone hunkered down for what turned out to be a dusting of snow followed by sunny days… Read More »Cloud Computing : The Coming Clouds and Storm
February 9, 2010
Lions Can’t Survive on Plastics The pending bankruptcy of MGM studios seems strange at a time when mega blockbuster films continue to defy the “old media industry” trend and bring in vast sums of money. What happened to the studio that owns James Bond, pending feature The Hobbit, and The Pink Panther? It got caught… Read More »Lions Can’t Survive on Plastics: Should Eat Bits Instead
February 5, 2010
CDN Pricing Content Delivery Network (CDN) industry watchers recently reported seeing pricing of $.01 per GB of data transferred. What does this mean? Let’s translate into plain language. A DVD holds about 4GB (Gigabytes) of data. So you can imagine a DVD with a very long movie, all kinds of extra scenes and goodies, would be require… Read More »CDN Pricing at Penny A Gig
February 3, 2010
Data Center supplier Playbook Few if any data centers would admit to making money on power. For one thing, it’s something that could get them in legal trouble depending on the jurisdiction. However, throughout the US, co-location facilities are taking sizeable margins on power by buying on a usage basis and selling on a capacity… Read More »Data Center supplier Playbook: Capacity-Based Power
January 29, 2010
IT outsourcing contract 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… Read More »IT Outsourcing Contract Negotiation Playbook: An Introduction
January 29, 2010
YouTube as a millstone around Google’s profitability is a mirage. Contrary to Credit Suisse’s estimates of a $470M annual loss, Google is more likely losing a fraction of that amount, due to peering for 73% of its traffic, buying bandwidth from some of the lowest-cost Tier 1 providers, using unprecedented bulk purchasing power to secure… Read More »YouTube Google’s Phantom Loss Leader
June 17, 2009