Management And Accounting Web

Clyman, J. 2004. Business IT: Rent or buy? Many companies are outsourcing IT duties to third parties and reaping benefits. PC Magazine (October 19): 129-132, 134, 136, 138.

Summary by James R. Martin, Ph.D., CMA
Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida

Outsourcing Main Page | Technology Main Page

The purpose of this article is to discuss the various types of business applications that are outsourced, the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing (motivators and obstacles) and to provide a list of companies and services offered. Some of the applications include:

Benefits administration,
Travel services,
Personnel administration,
Payment processing,
Payroll,
Billing,
Accounts receivable,
Tax management,
ERP,
Customer relationship management,
Procurement,
Customer service, and
Sales-force automation.

A useful table provides a list of companies, services provided, core offerings and web sites (p. 136). The table below provides some of that information including type of application, company name and URL. Consult the article and the company web sites for more specifics.

Type of Application Company URL
Customer relationship management Salesforce.com Inc. www.salesforce.com
Siebel Systems Inc. www.siebel.com
Accounting, benefits, billing, ERP, HR, payroll, Tax management and travel Automatic Data Processing Inc. www.adp.com
Ceridan Corp. www.ceridian.com
Concur Technologies Inc. www.concur.com
Ketera Technologies Inc www.ketera.com
NetSuite Inc. www.netsuite.com
Paychex Inc. www.paychex.com
Perfect Commerce Inc. www.perfect.com
Business analytics BMC Software www.bmc.com
Mercury Interactive Corp. www.mercury.com
SAS Institute Inc. www.sas.com
Managed security MessageLabs 2004 Ltd. www.messagelabs.com
VeriSign Inc. www.verisign.com
Counterpane Internet Security Inc. www.counterpane.com
TruSecure Corp. www.trusecure.com
LURHQ www.lurhq.com
Storage Vertas Software Corp. www.veritas.com
Legato and EMC Corp. www.legato.com
Hosted applications Endeavors Technology Inc. www.endeavors.com
Airframe Business Software Inc. www.myairframe.com
Application Corp www.hyperoffice.com
Intuit Inc. www.quickbase.com
Logicworks www.logicworks.net

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Soffront CRM Software is another software provider not mentioned in the article above. Sofftront offers Help Desk Software, Marketing and Sales Force Automation, Call Center Software integrated with knowledge Management and Customer Portal and other applications (www.soffront.com).

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Related summaries:

Clinton, B. D. and S. C. Del Vecchio. 2002. Cosourcing in manufacturing. Journal of Cost Management (September/October): 5-12. (Summary).

Clinton, B. D. and S. C. Del Vecchio. 2002. Cosourcing in manufacturing - Just in time. Journal of Cost Management (November/December): 30-37. (Summary).

Clyman, J. 2004. Business IT: Rent or buy? Many companies are outsourcing IT duties to third parties and reaping benefits. PC Magazine (October 19): 129-132, 134, 136, 138. (Note).

Karmarkar, U. 2004. Will you survive the services revolution? Harvard Business Review (June): 100-107. (Summary).

Kee, R. 1998. Integrating ABC and the theory of constraints to evaluate outsourcing decisions. Journal of Cost Management (January/February): 24-36. (Summary).

Widener, S. K. and F. H. Selto. 1999. Management control systems and boundaries of the firm: Why do firms outsource internal auditing activities? Journal of Management Accounting Research (11): 45-73. (Summary).