Outsource IT - IT is so last year

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?newsid=8667&pagtype=all

Hewlett Packard is introducing a range of new services and products intended to help accelerate business growth, lower costs and increase operational efficiency.

The new services focus on business intelligence, data centres and overall IT management, coupled with reference architectures for ready-to-deploy offerings for Microsoft Exchange Server, Oracle and SAP.

Reducing the cost of IT, the barrier to entry has to be a good thing, however, let me ask the following question.

I have a range of internal applications, with specific requirements running on legacy platforms, which lack the original source code, I need these supported, can I ask what the cost is?

Let me guess significantly more than my internal IT right? Everytime they charge me, I get emotional, I can’t do that with a vendor, they’ll post me the invoice instead.

IT is expensive absolutely, but its a double edge sword, internal IT should be moving away from box selling/buying to service provisioning, but underlying all this is the investment time needed to improve the application, better application logging, platform/severname/ip address independent, you’d be surprised what’s out there.  The box, the actual IT bit is expensive, but take any large clearance/back office application running on legacy platforms, and tell me how much does that cost in application and infrastructure support?

Statements aside, check out the article, it does look interesting, IT as a business line, as a service provider needs to continually improve, to maintain delivery, less it be compared with whoever else can provide that service or functionality.