Advanced Services: Part I

I hope that you enjoyed our series on ERP Trends in technology for 2010 and beyond. We’ve, hopefully, given you something to think about and to consider as you plan your IT strategy going forward. One of the more interesting things that we’ve deduced from observing these trends is the increase in services & support. At first glance you would think that this would be counter-intuitive given the advances in software. That is, with the newest versions of software being mostly self-managed—e.g. OEM, Cloud Computing – you would think that the need for specialized labor would decrease but in fact it has increased. Why is that? We are still trying to analyze the data to come up with a definitive answer but we believe that the most obvious answer is outsourcing. When we say outsourcing we don’t mean off-shoring, but we are referring to the traditional sense of outsourcing which is outside of your company. With the advances in bandwidth/networking and network security the impediments to a fully developed and deployed Service Oriented Architecture or Cloud Computing Architecture have been diminished and more firms are beginning to accept and adopt these technologies at a higher rate. As a result, the need for specialist that can fulfill some or all of the specialized IT needs of an organization has become a cottage industry. These architectures have permitted firms to consume what they need in discrete functions (services) or consume entire business process from a cloud. As a result, the need for extensive and specialized internal IT resources has been diminished. There are, however, moments when incidents arise and problems occur, and specialized talent will be required. Given the unpredictability of these events it isn’t prudent to carry the labor cost when these events are so random without a high degree of certainty of occurring. Therefore, a cottage industry has grown that provides on-demand specialized services as required at a minimal cost to provide the firms with the necessary specialized talent when needed. Part I