Stories by: Stephanie Overby

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.

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.)

Coty is growing.

CapGemini's announcement last week that it would invest $298 million in Brazilian IT service provider CPM Braxis attracted a lot of attention in outsourcing circles. The move will give the Paris-based company a 55 percent stake in CPM Braxis, the option to buy the company outright within three to five years of the close of the deal, and the chance to leapfrog its global competitors already entrenched in the country.