The May 2009 issue of Cutter IT Journal — with Guest Editor Cutter Senior Consultant Sara Cullen — invites useful debate and analyses on the current state of outsourcing and how a recession may change the landscape in terms of both current and future contracts and the provider market. We will explore the strategies that may help organizations weather the challenges outsourcing presents during these turbulent times.

Cutter IT Journal Call for Papers Sara Cullen, Guest Editor Abstract Submission Date: 20 February 2009 Articles Due: 27 March 2009 Guidelines for Contributors

The April 2009 Cutter IT Journal — with Guest Editor Cutter Senior Consultant Rebecca Herold, recently named one of the “Best Privacy Advisers” and “Best Privacy Consultancies” of 2008 by Computerworld — invites insightful debate on and analyses of approaches organizations are taking to ensure that information security, privacy and compliance areas collaborate, and how to address the associated convergence issues. What are the information security, privacy and compliance issues that impact organizations most significantly? What are the best practices for addressing the associated compliance requirements? What are the best ways to manage convergence? How can gaps be avoided? How can conflicts be resolved?

Cutter IT Journal Call for Papers Rebecca Herold, Guest Editor Abstract Submission Date: 23 January 2009 Articles Due: 6 March 2009 Guidelines for Contributors

Almost a month ago I told you about the cover story Bob Charette wrote for IEEE Spectrum on the problems in defense acquisition. Today, Robin Young of the NPR show Here & Now interviewed Bob about the article. You can listen to it here. The part with Bob begins about 5 minutes in, and lasts about 10 minutes.

Analysis of the data we collected in our fourth annual software-as-a-service (SaaS) market survey has revealed that 97% of responders are satisfied with their SaaS deployments. Jeff Kaplan will continue to analyze the data over the next few weeks. He wrote in a recent Business Technology Trends & Impacts Executive Update:

Given the tangible benefits survey respondents report gaining from their SaaS deployments, I’m not surprised by this finding, but still, it’s impressive! This is a satisfaction level that few established on-premise enterprise software vendors can match.

The benefits enterprises are enjoying that have lead to such an unprecedented satisfaction level include reducing infrastructure costs as a result of SaaS solutions, greater functional capabilities from their SaaS solutions, better application reliability and performance, and higher productivity and more systematic software Read more …

A recent Cutter Consortium survey revealed that 63% of responding organization are using a SaaS solution, up from 32% in 2007.

Over the past four years, Cutter has been charting the growth of the SaaS market with a series of yearly customer surveys. This effort has been spearheaded by Cutter Senior Consultant Jeffrey M. Kaplan. In analyzing the data for a Business Technology Trends & Impacts Executive Update, Kaplan wrote:

Last year, the survey gave us a hint that this jump in adoption might occur. Even before escalating fuel costs and the recent collapse of the credit markets, 80% of our SaaS survey respondents last year who reported they were considering SaaS solutions stated they expected to adopt a SaaS solution by the end of 2008. This year, 85% of those who are considering Read more …

Cutter’s Bob Charette has written the cover story, “What’s Wrong With Weapons Acquisitions?,” for this month’s IEEE Spectrum. The article highlights the problems in defense acquisition: spiraling costs, extremely lengthy project delays, politics trumping technology, a lack of skilled workers, and a dearth of institutional knowledge as a result of outsourcing. Sound familiar? The scope of the projects and of the failures Bob reports is immense, but the issues are surely ones you can identify with, regardless of which industry you’re in or where you’re based.

Bob interviewed dozens of industry and government defense-acquisition experts over the course of a year and a half to support this piece. When we talked about it, Bob remarked, “everybody I interviewed believes the acquisition process is in dire straights and desperately Read more …

I had just gotten off the phone with a Merrill Lynch advisor who I know well. She surmised that maybe there is even more capitulation ahead. Maybe we will soon see the Dow at 8,000? Jokingly, I said I would start buying at 6,000. The fear, however, is real and the effect of a big downturn in consumer spending will be significant, not just here in the U.S., but globally. In today’s economy which is driven by consumption, that means tough times for many firms are ahead.

From a business strategy standpoint, I see unique opportunities for well-placed firms. I would bet that 95% of all business are now engaging in identical and synchronous maneuvers: cut costs, shed headcount, seek low-cost labor sources, divest and hunker down. The competitor in me wonders if a differentiated business strategy might be in Read more …

It is back. And it is angry.

And it is called virtualization. And it has people afraid. But not me.

Think of it. All CPU cycles completely fungible. Imagine the possibilities.

Got 500 idle desktops running Microsoft Vista? Assign the CPU and I/O resources to your core ERP system. Need to bring up seven servers with a full middleware stack (web server, app server, message-oriented middleware server). No problem. Virtualize it. Have an Oracle database that you’d like to virtualize across different physical servers? Sure! Just don’t tell Oracle. Need to quickly relocate services from one data center to another. Piece of cake.

And you can do all this while being environmentally friendly. Imaging removing 5,000 PCs and replacing them with low energy thin client devices. After all, 5,000 PCs are mostly idle. It’s better to think about them as Read more …

We recently published the results of our annual Cutter Benchmark Review survey on trends and technologies for the coming year. This is the third yearly issue of CBR where we ask our contributors to look forward to the coming year and see what technologies and IT trends we can expect to endure, which ones are emerging, and which ones seem to be losing steam. Our ability to do trending and year-over-year comparisons is strengthening with every survey and the cumulating of results. We have been very careful in keeping some of the questions consistent so that we can comment on changes over time. The trends issues are particularly important in my opinion as they give us more than a spot evaluation of what is going on and instead enable us to take a more long-term view.

Read more …

Recently, I had the chance to talk with two CIOs from large, multi-billion and multi-national businesses with names we all recognize. To protect the identities of those involved, let’s call them Firm A and Firm B.

Firm A is a still rapidly growing consumer electronics manufacturing firm. But over the past ten years, this firm went from 1,000+ in IT staff to just over 500. They went from a couple dozen finance systems to one. They went from a dozen marketing systems to one. They went from about ten HR systems to one, seven relational database platforms to one, and a couple dozen data centers to less than a handful.

And now for the kicker. The IT budget went from about 4% of revenue to less than 1%. Along the way, their budget shifted from about 85% of the budget Read more …