In his roles as entrepreneur and technology executive, Jim McDonnell is a recognized industry leader in cloud software and services. He launched his career with four start-ups, and went on to lead the creation of new Cloud business units at Cisco and Avaya.Jim rejoined Cisco with the acquisition of European-based SolveDirect, where he served as President, Americas & Chief Product Officer. SolveDirect was a 2012 Gartner Cloud Services Brokerage “Cool Vendor” and the leading business process network for multisourced IT Services. Jim drove market growth in the Americas and gained analyst recognition for the company.While at Cisco earlier, Jim consolidated all software teams within Cisco Services to form the new Smart Services Technology Group, growing the business to $500M over three years and forming an architecturally unified portfolio of Cloud products. He grew the team from 30 into a globally distributed team of 1,000, and scaled the architecture to support 1M daily transactions. In addition, he led the formation of the services software patent portfolio, and the acquisition of Pari Networks.
“Simply put, successful multisourcing requires establishing end-to-end visibility, reporting and accountability for services that are delivered by multiple suppliers.”1 -Bill Martorelli, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research For the past two decades many enterprises managed their IT vendor relationships pretty much the same with batch updates and reviews. That worked well when they were fully outsourcing their […]
The landscape of IT has changed. The single-source provider era is quickly coming to an end as more companies embrace the world of multi-sourcing. In a 2014 report by IAOP & Information Services Group (ISG) Annual State of the Industry1, it stated that the number of enterprise IT organizations using multi-sourcing as a strategy increased […]
Digitization is in full swing in nearly every sector of the economy. In this atmosphere of universal disruption, every firm must be highly innovative and agile enough to respond to rapidly changing business demands. In short, the Internet has changed, companies are changing, and now IT needs to change. The Internet of Everything provides a […]
Last month, I attended the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) Outourcing World Summit in Phoenix, Arizona. I had the chance to glean fresh insights from industry-leading practitioners and get a global view from sourcing executives. Though there has been an evolution in the outsourcing industry, one thing has not changed: outsourcing is a winning […]
Recently I had the privilege to exchange thoughts at a roundtable discussion about the Future of Managed Services with our strategic partner Presidio. I would like to share some highlights from that dynamic dialogue. We all agreed, the services industry overall is heading to a tipping point. Managed services are becoming more attractive to IT, […]
The acronym SIAM stands for Service Integration And Management, and it is a hot topic in the world of IT Service Management…..but why? Service integration models have been around awhile, but are evolving from the challenges of managing a small number of large service partners to a model of managing a larger number of smaller […]
I had the opportunity to attend Cisco’s annual Partner Summit last month and I am excited about the news announced at the summit as well as the valuable conversations I had with our partners. The reoccurring topics I heard included cloud, innovation, speed, scale and, most importantly, differentiation. The partners I spoke with viewed exceptional […]
Cloud providers justifiably tout the ease and speed in which services can be implemented, but behind the curtain a dark reality lurks. “Easy on” is a key selling feature of cloud services and for good reason. I well remember leading enterprise application implementation projects in the pre-cloud era. The initial thrill of taking on a […]
When I ask IT executives how happy they are with their external support providers (outsourcers, vendors, etc.) invariably they express deep frustration. They look to these vendors to be real partners – to collaborate effectively and seamlessly, to do their job efficiently and transparently, and to bring real innovation to the table. Instead, they feel […]
