Editor's Note: We regret to let you know that in 2007, we will no longer be publishing the Outsourcing newsletter. Starting Jan. 3, you will begin to receive our Network/Systems Management newsletter, which publishes every Monday and Wednesday. That newsletter is also written by analysts at Enterprise Management Associates. If you would like to update your newsletter subscription, or sign up for others, please go to the Subscription Services link below. We thank you for your continued support.

I have received a number of e-mails from readers wondering if I will continue writing on outsourcing and how they can continue to receive future content. I am planning to provide similar content in the future from a blog or other location yet to be determined. If you would like to be informed of how to continue to get this content, please register here, and I will you know how to receive my future writings on this subject.

One of the expected benefits of most outsourcing is cost savings or better quality for similar cost. Given that the outsourcing vendor expects to make a profit from their efforts, it is interesting to explore how it is that they can do the same work for less money or the same work for the same money with a better quality result. For infrastructure intensive functions like data centers or server farms, the cost efficiencies come from large scale operations and investment in automation in the form of IT management software. In offshoring, the cost efficiencies come from labor cost arbitrage. So how do outsourcers performing professional services such as software development or database management gain efficiencies if not from offshore resources?

Professional services based outsourcers can gain efficiencies in many ways that do not require offshore resources. They can benefit from large scale operations just as a data center operations benefit from large scale. High cost specialists like architects or database administrators (DBAs) can be leveraged across a large number of projects. Technical writers and QA resources have less down time as they can support a number of projects as well. In a way, this is like sharing an expensive and underutilized resource similar to how virtualized servers can reduce hosting costs.

Whitepapers

• Advancing the Economics of Networking
• Enterprise Data Center Network Reference Architecture
• Implementing HA at the Enterprise Data Center Edge to Connect to a Large Number of Branch Offices
• File Integrity Monitoring: Secure Your Virtual and Physical IT Environments
• Accelerating a Diverse Mix of Traffic Across the WAN
• Boost Productivity While Cutting Costs with Next-generation Collaboration

View more LANS & WANS whitepapers

Webcasts

• PoE Plus: Impact on the PoE Market
• Creating a high performance workplace with wireless networking
• Harnessing the power of communications to increase workplace performance
• How to cut IT costs with wide-area data services (WDS)
• Making data centers the IT strategic focus
• Protecting assets and employees with IP Video Surveillance

View more LANS & WANS webcasts

Special Reports

• Ethernet Services: WAN options mature
• Keeping Spam at Bay
• Get More From Your WAN
• WAN Optimization: How to rev up sluggish applications
• IP address management in 2008 - six things to know
• Network World Executive Guide: Perfecting Application Performance Management

View more LANS & WANS special reports