Outsourcers aim to aid new data center Hand Doing your due diligence Deciding to outsource Tooling up for the new data center The self-managing desktop Compelled to outsource

When Karl Kaiser became CIO of Minneapolis five years ago, he found the IT infrastructure was not as capable of supporting the business of running a city as he - and the city constituency - wanted it to be.

"Sixty percent of my budget and management energy went into just keeping the infrastructure alive," says Kaiser, noting that his staff was overwhelmed with break/fix duties inherent in the city's multivendor environment and seemed more concerned with gee-whiz technology than serving the city.

Minneapolis' 4,000 city workers, including police officers, firefighters and government officials, needed more than that. "They were looking for services that went well beyond installing and fixing computers. They wanted more applications, especially Web applications," he says.

Besides new Web initiatives, Kaiser had to fund a disaster-recovery program, find a new space for his data center (which was ending its lease with the county) and staff the city for 24/7 support - all within a tight budget. Kaiser took a hard look at outsourcing and decided it made sense - to a point. He sold his entire desktop, server and network infrastructure - and its management - to Unisys, while keeping application development in-house. The result, he says, is a happier constituency and an estimated $20 million savings over the seven-year life of the contract.

"I decided to get out of that business because the information technology assets and the associated support functions in my mind are a utility. It's like you come to the office and switch on the lights. The light comes on, but that doesn't mean you need to own the power plant," he says.

Minneapolis is not alone. Faced with similar prospects and the need to move quickly to next-generation data center environments, many organizations see the benefits of offloading mundane operations tasks while focusing on the value IT brings to the business.

Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, for example, outsourced its hardware and network infrastructure to HP in an effort to ease its move off a mainframe and onto a next-generation computing environment that features Web services running on Unix and Linux servers (see related story ).By offloading the operations side of the house, IT could focus on developing core profit-generating reservations and loyalty systems applications, says Tom Conophy, CTO at the White Plains, N.Y., hotelier.