Welcome to B & M Bulletin, produced specifically for users of IT technical services. In this issue:
• Contract market trends
• Tech View: Cloud Computing
• Top 10 trends in IT contracting
• B & M ProSupport
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Contract Market Trends
Jerry Smart, MD of B & M Europe, looks at current trends in contracting and what they mean for users of professional contract services
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backfill or flex your workforce with contract staff
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The consensus is that it is not quite as easy as it was to source skilled contractors, although this is not consistent across all markets or regions. B & M’s Business Director Ed Hopper was recently interviewed for an article entitled, ‘IT contractors bear brunt of downturn’ in the Institute of Engineering and Technology magazine, ET. Ed observed, “Our business, traditionally, has been split 50/50 across the UK on one hand, and continental Europe on the other. The UK market has been much more adversely affected by the slowdown than the EU marketplace which has remained reasonably stable throughout the downturn.”
Ed explained B & M’s viewpoint: “Where skills are available in-house, it is true to say that clients prefer to use their own permanent staff to undertake the core work, with contractors providing backfill, BAU support. This is both to enable the client to retain the skills in-house once the project is completed (and contractors would have left for new assignments elsewhere), and also because in-house staff already have a high level of site-specific knowledge which is often required to implement new systems related to the project. This enables the in-house staff to be productive more quickly than new externals.”
According to the article, demand for IT contractors with certain skills, particularly in technical project management, is already starting to build. Iain McIlwee, head of commercial development at the contractors’ industry association the Professional Contractors’ Group was quoted as saying, “Engaging a short-term contractor for a specific project, with specific skills, makes much more sense for a firm, and we are seeing evidence that this is happening.”
The choice is, therefore, to reassign your permanent staff (always assuming that you have the right skills in house) or to backfill or flex your workforce with contract staff. To secure quality contract or permanent staff with the skills you need to move your projects forward, please contact sales@bmeuerope.com.
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Hey, you, get off of my (Private) Cloud
Cloud computing has been a buzzword in the industry for a couple of years now. Paul Smith, Technical Manager at B & M Europe, looks at different types of cloud and what they deliver
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The term Cloud Computing has now been around for some time. However, as with a lot of technologies in the ICT sector, it can be hard to understand what it is and how it is actually of use in business.
There are several types of cloud: private (or internal); public (or external) and hybrid clouds. Although they are built differently, they all share the same purpose of delivering a facility as a service: it could be Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS).
The services being delivered are, in fact, network-based computing resources hosting a set of solutions for an end-user. Services based on cloud resources that people may be familiar with include:
- Amazon Web Services
- MessageLabs (Email screening and Web Proxy)
- Social media (such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook)
- Google App Engine
- Heroku
- .NET Solution Stacks (now AppFabric)
Services such as Microsoft’s Azure environment and IBM’s Internal or Smart Analytics Cloud are examples of companies releasing commercial solutions to support ‘Cloud Enterprises’. Some cloud offerings are designed to support clouds on hardware resources that are not ‘on-premise’. The Azure platform, for example, is run from Microsoft datacentres, whereas IBM’s solution is designed to create clouds in System Z complexes, hosted on-site or in a datacentre local to the user.
With the IBM offering, System Z servers can run z/OS (supporting Tivoli, RACF and DB2), LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) Stacks or Linux/WebSphere/DB2 implementations, which are becoming increasingly popular as a means of supporting e-commerce.
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Top 10 trends in IT contracting
Jerry Smart shares some of B & M’s observations of trends emerging in IT resourcing this year:
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- Using contractors to ‘backfill’ business as usual when permanent staff are deployed on core projects
- Earlier recovery of the IT contracting market in Continental Europe
- Using contractors to work around headcount freezes for permanent staff
- Shorter term budgeting
- Providing flexible resourcing in uncertain economic times.
- Avoiding the overheads of taking on permanent staff
- Outsourcing (onshore and offshore)
- Using contractors to transfer knowledge to permanent staff for their Continuous Professional Development
- Supplementing technical staff to catch up on software levels
- Using contractors to achieve organisational flexibility
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B & M ProSupport
proactive IT support
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B & M ProSupport is a flexible support service designed to meet the very different IT situations
within large enterprises. B & M ProSupport offers a choice of second and third-level support services that help to reduce downtime and keep the business running - right up to on-site, 24/7 support if required.
B & M ProSupport can be tailored to include a mixture of proactive and reactive services, combining cost-efficiency with optimum system protection. B & M's specialists work in collaboration with customers' own in-house IT staff to analyse, build, integrate, manage and develop IT continuity processes that make sure that key platforms are constantly available to support the business.
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