Bank re-signs IBM for IT

According to Westpac's chief information officer Bob McKinnon, the decision to re-sign IBM for its massive outsourcing deal with the bank had much to do with the vendor's home court advantage: incumbency, says ZDNet.

Speaking to ZDNet Australia, McKinnon said IBM had eight years of experience with Westpac, adding that the bank faced the risk of sitting stagnant for 12 to 18 months if it were to migrate to another IT services provider.

"Incumbency is always a big advantage in the sense that to move something from an incumbent service provider to another service provider requires a big investment, a lot of risk and potential[ly] 'treading-water' while you just move something without actually adding any value," McKinnon said.

Taiwan's King Yuan Electronics Company (KYEC), Sigurd Microelectronics and Ardentec are expected to focus on gaining more outsourcing from international IDMs in 2011, according to industry sources, writes DigiTimes.

The three wafer-probing service providers generate most of their sales from local Taiwan-based companies. KYEC, Sigurd and Ardentec saw substantial growth in the contributions of sales from IDMs to their total revenues in the third quarter of 2010, the sources indicated, the report states.

KYEC, which mainly provides testing services for LCD driver ICs, memory chips and handset-related solutions, saw Taiwan-based fabless customers' contribution drop below 60% for the first time in the third quarter. The report shows contribution from KYEC's non-Taiwan based IDM clients grew to 41% of its total revenues in the third quarter, up from 36% in the second. The rising contribution also buoyed the company's overall gross margin to 28.5% from 26% in the prior quarter.

Fujitsu has introduced a private cloud service, offering private clouds as an outsourcing service that includes server/storage virtualisation and automation, and a dedicated cloud-computing environment in Japan, states CBR Online.

The company says this is an outsourcing service in which it will handle the complete lifecycle of the customer's private cloud, including planning and design for initial deployment, construction, operation and maintenance, and decommissioning and disposition.

In addition, the private cloud's infrastructure environment is combined with an array of maintenance services, and allows for on-demand usage with a rate schedule that is proportionate to usage with flat monthly base charges, says Fujitsu.