Managing Outsourcing Deals ...

Computerworld - ... involving more than one outsourcer operating from more than one location is increasingly common for many IT shops, says John Bostick, CEO of dbaDirect Inc. in Florence, Ky. He says more and more of his 100 corporate customers have struck outsourcing deals with the likes of IBM Global Services, Electronic Data Systems Corp., Keane Inc. and other big outsourcers. But they still want to take advantage of his company's focus on databases as well as the low overhead he has from running his main data center out of Boone County, Ky. That means he's coordinating work requests from user sites and giant outsourcers' data centers. Despite Bostick's fervent belief that U.S.-based specialized outsourcers such as dbaDirect can effectively compete with offshore operations, he's had to add database administrators in Bangalore to meet "follow-the-sun" demands from clients. Currently, dbaDirect manages 2,500 databases, with 45 to 50 being run by a senior DBA who has an operations specialist in tow. At the moment, Bostick says, Oracle and SQL Server are running neck and neck, each with 45% of the database work dbaDirect has under contract. "But Microsoft is growing like a weed," he says. Sybase makes up 8%. DB2 and Informix fight over the scraps. MySQL has cropped up in a couple customer conversations, he says, "so we're looking into it for the future."
Catching Killer Calls for ...
... complex document management operations. Dave Ryan, IT director and senior deputy prosecutor for King County in Seattle, recalls that nailing Gary Ridgeway, the infamous Green River Killer, began with a paper trail of three-ring binders investigators used in the 1980s when the string of brutal murders began. Eventually, Ryan says, he had "a whole roomful of three-ring notebooks." Not having the staff on hand to digitize the mountain of information, Ryan turned to Chameleon Data Corp., also in Seattle. CEO Derek Dohn says his team had to digitize the data and organize it in three formats for different users - the prosecution, public defenders and, ultimately, the public at large. Ryan says that a key moment in the gathering of evidence came when investigators discovered that unique paint samples from Ridgeway's workplace were discovered on three victims' bodies. The prosecution had already tied Ridgeway to four other murdered women who were prostitutes that the then-suspect claimed he had coincidentally met. Technology from eCopy Inc. in Nashua, N.H., "that feels like a garden-variety copier to paralegals" was used to scan the paint-sample lab-report information into the document management system so that it