Stories by Stephanie Overby

When Ricoh Europe realized its IT environment was both spiraling out of control and environmentally unfriendly, it turned to a IT services provider for help. Working with Infosys, Ricoh developed a private cloud that helped it consolidate nine data centers into two, cutting infrastructure costs and reducing carbon dioxide emissions significantly.

There's little doubt that multi-sourcing enterprise IT services. The average US IT shop is working with 13.5 service providers overall, according to Gartner. But managing multiple providers remains a challenge for most IT organizations.

HP had little to offer in the way of good news last week. The company reported an $8.9 billion loss —the largest in the company's 73-year history —driven by a $10.8 billion write-down related to its 2008 acquisition of IT service provider EDS and severance costs associated with recent layoffs.

It's been more than three years since HP acquired IT services provider EDS, and the long-term direction of its bigger - if not better - outsourcing business is no more clear than it was on the day the deal closed.

Watson - IBM's Jeopardy!-playing supercomputer - handily defeated two of the game show's strongest contestants, but can it beat cancer?

In June, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) announced plans to propose new rules to increase transparency and disclosure on phone bills in order to help protect consumers from "cramming", the illegal addition of unauthorized fees onto a monthly phone bills.

To those who know their IT outsourcing history, GE and offshoring are practically synonymous.

The Infosys employee who is suing the Indian IT service provider for allegedly violating visa and tax laws in order to increase its profit margins has gone more public in recent weeks, providing written testimony of his claims to Congress and instructing his lawyer to share internal Infosys documents and emails with CIO.com that appear to back up some of his assertions.

If there were a relatively straightforward way for an IT leader to boost his company's bottom line by millions of dollars a year, chances are he wouldn't ignore it. But that's just what many CIOs are doing as a result of poor outsourcing management.

When iGate completed its $1.2 billion acquisition of Patni Computer Systems in May, the two offshore outsourcing providers instantly leapt over their mid-tier outsourcing peers to become one of the biggest IT outsourcing providers in India.

Business strategy is getting short shrift in outsourcing relationships while outsourcing customers and providers focus excessively on basic service level agreements (SLAs), according to a recent survey conducted by Accenture and the Shared Services and Outsourcing Network (SSON).

The Indian government has finally taken a step toward creating a comprehensive set of data protection rules to safeguard privacy, but the proposed regulations released this spring are likely to have a major impact on the global enterprises doing business with Indian outsourcers.

China's data privacy protection has long been considered one of the world's weakest. But the government's proposed data security guidelines may go too far in the opposite direction.

One of CIOs' biggest concerns about the infrastructure-as-a-service model has been the loss of control over assets and management that enterprises might experience upon moving into a multi-tenant environment. While analysts and early adopters of infrastructure-as-a-service offerings have argued that such apprehension is rooted more in fear than fact, Amazon's recent public data center debacle has given everyone good reason to question the reliability of the public cloud.

Forget all the discussion about IT outsourcing providers moving up the technology value chain to become partners in innovation; their customers' biggest needs remain much more straightforward, according to the results of the IDG Enterprise Outsourcing & Service Providers Survey. (CIO.com is an IDG company.)