Paula Musich

Once little more than marketing schemes designed to promote gear purchases, vendor-sponsored certification programs are fast becoming a respectable way for application service providers and hosts to prove they have survived the service provider shakeout. This new breed of certification effort, which is proving useful to service providers struggling to gain the credibility they need […]

Hewlett-Packard Co. this week will introduce an architecture for its OpenView management platform that it expects will appeal to service providers by making OpenView tools more modular. By making the tools more modular, HP is setting the stage for a more open type of management in which a single, proprietary management application can be integrated […]

Services remain a bright spot in an otherwise tepid period of IT spending, but the way services deals are developing is changing the face of the providers themselves. IT spending on services is expected to grow at 17 percent per year between last year and 2004, making up 45.2 percent of all IT spending worldwide—and […]

United Parcel Service of America Inc. has been a quiet company, steadily increasing its business through new technology but rarely calling attention to its efforts. That stance has masked one of the most technologically advanced IT operations in the Fortune 1000. UPS impressive string of accomplishments includes being the first package delivery company to offer […]

The relatively unproven MSP business model got a credibility boost recently with the signing of a multimillion- dollar contract between a new management service provider and Global 2000 manufacturer Freightliner LLC. The contract, valued at between $5 million and $10 million over three years, is one of the largest MSP contracts signed to date, and […]

Most of the wireless work done by professional services today involves deploying wireless telecommunications infrastructures. But there is a small, quiet groundswell of enterprise WLAN deployments beginning to take shape. IBM Global Services is so convinced of the opportunities for helping clients deploy wireless LANs and wireless-enabled legacy applications that it expects its fledgling wireless […]

Amid the gloom and doom of layoffs, faltering revenue and stock price nose dives, the one bright spot in IT appears to be the management software sector. The earnings reporting season has turned up a string of good news for tools providers ranging from Micromuse Inc. and InfoVista SA to Aprisma Management Technologies, along with […]

Microsoft Corp., in its ever-growing desire to gain ground in the enterprise, last week integrated its Microsoft Consulting Services and Product Support Services into a worldwide services organization thats 13,000 employees strong. In doing so, the Redmond, Wash., company has done an about-face on the issue of consulting and managing enterprise contracts. Now, rather than […]

When startup Interactive Plus One LLC first tried to find help in getting its business online, company officials started by searching the Web and cold-calling services companies. The result was a four-month ordeal of analyzing providers, reviewing past projects and checking references before Interactive Plus One finally hired a professional services company. For their next […]

Although the final chapter has yet to be written in the dramatic fall of MarchFirst Inc., the first pieces torn off in its dismantling tell the story of where a Web integrators real value might exist. While other Web boutiques continue to labor—with rumors of layoffs and acquisitions dogging their efforts—Divine InterVentures Inc. took a […]