ITDebate: datacenter outsource economics

Your decision making IT folks should be employees, not contractors. You must remember that a contractor/vendor will not always come up with the most efficient solution. They do work for another company and it is in their best interest to build morebusiness for their company and bill more hours.

Several major auto companies and tier-1 suppliers that had outsourced all IT in the 80's are now doing a major change in IT policy. They found that IT contractors were running their business and making major business decisions that should have been made by internal staff. Of course the vendor's agenda is to build more business for themselves.

Personnally, I have experienced having to correct vendor business solutions to make them more efficient on numerous occasions. Not that they are all like that, but I find it more common then you would like to believe.

As for data centers in particular, I would ask how mission critical are your applications. If you do go the outsourcing route make sure you know your business requirements and get in writing the Service Level Agreement that will support those requirements. Set it up with financial incentives/penalities for the data center vendor to meet the SLA.

I hope you find thesecomments useful!