Virtual Desktops

Now here’s a great story about a firm leveraging technology to gain efficiencies. Rory Clements, chief tech systems architect for CB Richards Ellis, a Los Angeles based global real estate company, has undertaken converting CBRE’s 40,000 traditional PCs into virtual desktops. “His guinea pigs: 2,000 London-based executives, surveyors, appraisers and agents. In exchange for giving up their company-issued Windows XP desktops and laptops, Clements is giving each employee access to a virtual copy of a new, more powerful Windows 7 desktop residing in CBRE's private data center.

Using the latest virtualization technology from VMware, Clements can push out a Windows 7 desktop to any PC the employee happens to have handy. It could be an old office XP machine, a personally owned netbook or a computer in an Internet cafe in Kuala Lumpur, for that matter. The employee gets full access to company e-mail, databases and business applications.

Some top CBRE executives will even be able to access their company-issued Windows 7 virtual desktops on their smartphones and tablet PCs.”

While the upfront costs of doing this are huge, the company anticipates huge savings over time. CBRE not only stands to gain cost efficiencies, employees should also become more efficient, thereby increasing productivity.

India's Outsourcing Firms Post Record Growth

  As the outsourcing discussion heats up in class, it’s interesting to see that India’s major outsourcing companies have posted “unprecedented revenue growth,” according to an article on the website InfoTech Spotlight. A sign that outsourcing continues to be a growing trend. The companies, Tata Consulting Services, Infosys Technologies, and Wipro, were last week “all predicting impressive growth this year” and as a result were hiring in large numbers to meet the growing demand. The article posits that Tata Consulting Services is expecting to end the fiscal year with $8 billion in revenues. According TCS’ CEO such growth, given the uncertain economic situation is a positive indication about the global demand recovery going forward. In my opinion, this could also be an indication that companies continue to be cautious about the global recovery and as such are continuing with the trend to remain as lean as possible. The company also said that “all major outsourcing markets showed double digits, Europe leading the pack” and its North American revenues crossed one billion dollars.

 Some of the Tata’s key new clients this year are “Canada's large financial institutions, a Fortune Top 50 Healthcare company, a U.S.-based large banking and financial services institution, the Phoenix Group, a leading publishing and education services provider, a leading grocery retailer, and a leading North American general merchandise retailer.”

 By the way, has anyone seen the NBC comedy Outsourced?

Nokia

In class we’ve been talking a lot about change. Not just changing technology, but also changing corporate. Our panelists on Thursday talked even more about this. In our discussions we came across companies that willing to embrace change and some that are unwilling to embrace. We also talked about how this willingness or unwillingness to embrace change has affected their businesses. As the discussion continues, I came across an interesting article in the New York Times this past week about Nokia. Nokia is the world’s leading supplier of mobile phones controlling (as of June 2010) 40.3 percent of the world mobile phone market, down from 40.7 percent last year. In the United States, Nokia controls 8.1 percent of the mobile phone market, but in 2002 controlled 35 percent of this said market.

Nokia recently appointed a new CEO, Stephen Elop, and the article discusses the challenges he will face to changing the long standing corporate culture at Nokia, a culture of “complacency” and one heavily influenced by bureaucracy. According to the article Nokia developed a touch screen, internet ready mobile phone years before Apple released the IPhone. However, influenced by their own complacency and bureaucracy managers at Nokia killed the development of the mobile phone.

Now with a new CEO at its helm and it lags behind in the smartphone world, Nokia has reached a kind of cross road. How is the new CEO going to create a corporate culture that is conducive to innovation? How far reaching should these changes be? Or as the world leader in the mobile phone market, should they continue with what they’ve been doing thus far?