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Creative sourcing in tough times

 
Content starts here Outsourcing
Outsourcing can squeeze more money from shrinking IT budgets while improving how you do business. Whether you outsource the management of an application, a business process or even your entire IT environment, sourcing your needs with industry experts frees up your organization to concentrate on its expertise—your business.

Application outsourcing

Applications are the core of nearly every business. They enable everything, from the functionality of internal departments to customer communications and product and service delivery. Sometimes when things change—your infrastructure or the market you compete in—applications need to change along with them. Application outsourcing is simply turning over application management or modernization to a team of experts who facilitate those changes.

Whether you need to modernize a single SAP application or manage your entire application environment, application outsourcing can:

When Bank of India embarked on an enterprise-wide business transformation, executives decided to outsource both the implementation and ongoing management of applications and IT infrastructure to HP.

“To compete against public and private sector banks in India and beyond, we needed to move rapidly beyond 'branch automation' to enterprise-wide 'bank automation,'" says D. Krishnamurthy, general manager of retail banking marketing and publicity for Bank of India.

HP rolled out and is managing a suite of core banking applications and an integrated customer data warehouse, modernizing the bank's 2,700-plus branches. Outsourcing its applications allows the bank to concentrate on core competencies. “We wanted to be able to stay focused on strategic business and IT initiatives, not technology,” Krishnamurthy says.


Business process outsourcing

If your business processes aren’t efficient or agile, chances are your business isn’t, either. But fine-tuning those processes can be daunting and costly. Process improvement also can be disruptive and distracting to employees, especially in companies with global offices or a tangle of back office applications.

Business process outsourcing lets you turn over the optimizing of your processes to a team of experts who know how to increase speed and quality of business process transactions. Outsourcing can help you benefit from best practices that can lead to:


IT infrastructure outsourcing

Certain parts of the IT infrastructure bring their own unique challenges. Disaster recovery, security, server and storage management all require special skill sets that you may not have in-house. Even when you have those specialized staff members, you might prefer to direct their talents to strategic initiatives instead of day-to-day maintenance and operations.

Outsourcing these parts of your infrastructure enables transformation that keeps your business up and running with newfound efficiency. Even in heterogeneous environments, HP’s infrastructure outsourcing services can help you:

Belgium-based Carrefour Group, one of the world’s leading retail distribution companies, turned to HP to help modernize and streamline its IT functions. After consolidating and modernizing Carrefour Group's data centers and desktops, HP helps run the infrastructure and manages the help desk, some office applications and several IT infrastructure components.

Outsourcing has allowed Carrefour Group to rapidly modernize aspects of its infrastructure without large upfront investments. Outsourcing also gives the company more flexibility to change how IT services are configured and delivered.

Thanks to outsourcing, Carrefour Group expects to reduce its IT costs by 20 percent, modernize applications and improve system availability.


Strategic IT Outsourcing

If management of your company’s IT is becoming a costly drain on the business’ ability to adapt to change, it might be cost-effective to outsource the entire IT function—a move known as strategic outsourcing. It can radically simplify IT and puts the entire environment into the hands of specialists.

For example, when Procter & Gamble wanted to drive global scale and operational efficiency, it turned to HP. HP first helped transform the infrastructure, and now manages 4,500 servers, 1 petabyte of storage and 115,000 workstations in 80 countries. Not only is P&G’s IT environment optimized for efficiency, but the company achieves higher service levels and adapts faster to business change.


Conclusion

IT is always expected to rope in costs and contribute to strategic business initiatives that give the company competitive advantage. HP offers a broad range of outsourcing services to meet any level of need, from one-time consultations to managing individual applications or business process, to outsourcing your entire infrastructure. And HP brings with it a full hardware and software portfolio.

When you turn over your technology and processes to the experts, it leaves more resources to focus on your expertise—your business. That's smart in a recession and beyond


These customers' results depended upon their unique business and IT environments, the way they used HP products and services, and other factors. These results may not be typical. Your results may vary.
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Look before you leap: tips for outsourcing

Partnering with an outsourcer is a commitment that can't be made lightly. Before you decide to externally source any process or service, be certain the outsourcer is someone you're willing to work with hand-in-hand, is reputable and can meet your full range of needs.

Don’t buckle under management pressure to execute deals too quickly:

Management wants results, but results rely on carefully orchestrated engagements.

Governance:

Ensure everyone agrees to expectations. They also should agree to realign expectations when necessary, especially if you’re working with multiple outsourcers.

Vendor reputation and experience:

Request case studies that recount the vendor’s successes in similar outsourcing situations. Request in-person references to get a feel for what it's like to work with the outsourcer.

Comprehensive portfolio:

A full breadth of outsourcing services plus a comprehensive portfolio of hardware and software solutions mean that your outsourcer can handle issues as they arise. It also means that the vendor understands relationships among different parts of the IT infrastructure.

Be ready to do your part:

Outsourcing requires a commitment not only from your vendor, but from your organization. Companies that keep the lines of communication and cooperation open get the best outcomes.