NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: MARK EHR ON OUTSOURCING 11/03/04 Today's focus: CompuCredit finds success with offshore business process outsourcing
Dear [EMAIL PROTECTED], In this issue: * A business process outsourcing success story * Links related to Outsourcing * Featured reader resource _______________________________________________________________ This newsletter is sponsored by NetScout The deployment of VoIP is well underway and unstoppable, but the implementation and ongoing support is extremely challenging. To successfully support VoIP and other demanding applications, IT organizations need to change their approach to network management. Learn about readiness assessment, design and ongoing management in the Network World Special Report: Recommendations for Implementing and Managing Converged Networks. http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=85930 _______________________________________________________________ NW TECHNOLOGY INSIDER: STORAGE ILM With real benefits in terms of saving money and making business run more smoothly, information lifecycle management deserves a closer look. In this in-depth technology review, we profile users who are on the cutting edge of ILM and describe how ILM can be one of the building blocks of the new data center. Click here: http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=86088 _______________________________________________________________ Today's focus: CompuCredit finds success with offshore business process outsourcing By Mark Ehr A couple of weeks ago, I promised to write about offshore outsourcing successes and failures. To that end, this week's column describes the successes that CompuCredit has enjoyed in outsourcing business processes to a service provider in India. CompuCredit is a marketing and servicing company providing consumers with a variety of financial services including branded credit cards, debit cards and fee-based products and services. I spoke with CompuCredit CTO Mark Lawrence, a few weeks ago as we discussed his company's business process outsourcing (BPO) success story. According to Lawrence, CompuCredit's primary BPO drivers included cost-reduction, the ability to focus on core competencies, improved service levels, and shortened times to market for new products. Potential inhibitors included a perceived loss of control, concerns about service dependability and security, and the cost of the solution. CompuCredit also needed to maintain control and security over applications and data while reducing implementation time, offshore bandwidth requirements, and the overall costs and risks of using an offshore service provider. The company also needed to remain in compliance with regulations - a key BPO concern for many. CompuCredit's offshore BPO initiative began in 2001 when it underwent a large cost-cutting transformation in order to conserve cash to weather the recession. In support of this, in 2002 the company cut a large percentage of its IT staff and decided to move its customer service contact centers, which were already outsourced to an onshore service provider, to an offshore model - quickly. India was the primary target for the offshore initiative, with Panama as a secondary (for Spanish language operations). The goal was to outsource all "level 1" inbound customer service calls while keeping escalations and collections calls in-house. The company's IT organization had to ensure that this transition happened smoothly, delivering a mixture of custom and standard applications to the outsourcer while maintaining security. Since the company was already a Citrix customer, it chose the MetaFrame Access Suite as the delivery mechanism (note that the company kept its entire IT infrastructure in its Atlanta data center, choosing to outsource only the call center). By delivering only an encrypted presentation layer to the outsourcer, CompuCredit maintained security while requiring the service provider to offer only basic desktop PCs - the service provider was not required to install any software other than the Citrix ICA client. Another advantage of this approach is that if CompuCredit decides to switch service providers, the process is straightforward. The company uses the service provider's U.S.-based data and voice consolidator to transport all traffic to India, and the consolidator takes care of making the connections to the service provider. If CompuCredit decides to move to another service provider, it simply requires voice and data connections to the new service provider's consolidator for its traffic. Since there is no software (other than the ICA client) installed on the service provider's workstations, once basic voice and data connectivity is established and agent training is completed, the service provider can begin taking calls. Since only Layer 7 traffic is transferred, bandwidth requirements are very small - between 5K-bit/sec and 7K-bit/sec per session. The company also supports 700 concurrent users on 50 Citrix servers with 1.5 IT FTEs (full-time equivalents) managing the farm - a very efficient operation by anyone's standard. The key takeaways from CompuCredit's experience, in my opinion, are as follows: 1) The company was able to quickly outsource due to its Citrix infrastructure. 2) By only outsourcing the business process, the company was able to keep all of its data and applications in-house and secure. 3) The combination of Citrix with the data consolidator enables CompuCredit to use an amount of leverage with its service provider, as the process of switching from one provider to another is relatively simple. For shops without a Citrix infrastructure, the process would be somewhat more difficult but not impossible. There are parallels using other technologies, such as Microsoft's Terminal Services and VMware's ACE products, including Web applications, which provide similar benefits. For CompuCredit, the key was being able to avoid loading applications and data on the service provider's infrastructure, which allows the company to enjoy the cost savings of BPO without much of the risk. Thanks go to Mark Lawrence for his time and to Citrix for helping to set up the meeting. I welcome your ideas, suggestions and comments on the subject of outsourcing; my e-mail address is below. Thanks for reading. _______________________________________________________________ To contact: Mark Ehr Mark Ehr is a Research Director with Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo., a leading market research firm focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management software and services. Mark has more than 20 years of experience working with distributed systems, applications and networks. His current focuses at EMA are applications and systems management, mobile and wireless, enterprise application integration, security, and Web services. He can be reached via e-mail at <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________________________ This newsletter is sponsored by NetScout The deployment of VoIP is well underway and unstoppable, but the implementation and ongoing support is extremely challenging. To successfully support VoIP and other demanding applications, IT organizations need to change their approach to network management. Learn about readiness assessment, design and ongoing management in the Network World Special Report: Recommendations for Implementing and Managing Converged Networks. http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=85929 _______________________________________________________________ ARCHIVE LINKS Archive of the Outsourcing newsletter: http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/asp/index.html Breaking outsourcing news and resource links: http://www.nwfusion.com/topics/outsourcing.html _______________________________________________________________ FEATURED READER RESOURCE NW CLEAR CHOICE TESTS The Network World Lab Alliance is a coalition of industry experts, network integration consultants, independent test labs and universities who conduct single-product reviews and head-to-head comparative tests in real enterprise network settings. 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