Join BearingPoint senior manager Bill Stotzer in exploring the challenges facing the sourcing and procurement organizations today. Many financial institutions have identified procurement cost savings and made an attempt at cost reduction. Some have achieved greater success than others. We see two primary factors contributing to the low success rate in cost reduction. First, due to favorable market conditions in the Financial Services sector over the past five years, minimal attention was paid to cost effective Sourcing and Procurement. Second, the financial services industry has also experienced a significant amount of merger & acquisition activity over the last 5 years. Although a fair amount of integration activities have occurred, the combination of these institutions has created another set of challenges.
Sourcing and procurement cost takeout is very easy to understand at the strategic level. One needs to identify where an organization can consolidate spend, use enterprise leverage to negotiate lower unit cost, and then direct the users to purchase from the new enterprise contract. However, in a large global institution, with a fair degree of autonomy in the business units, these tasks can be very ...
I’ve always loved the little devices that Belkin makes, especially for frugal geeks like myself.
In an earlier podcast with the Frag Dolls, we covered Belkin’s new game controller, and this time, Belkin’s Robert Naugle shows some of the other gadgets they’re releasing; like the
Microsoft has officially discontinued production of its Xbox 360 external HD-DVD player. The decision comes days after consumer electronics giant Toshiba announced that it will no longer produce HD-DVD products, essentially ending the HD-format war with Sony’s Blu-Ray. Video game juggernaut Electronic Arts wants to take over Take-Two ... Understanding is Only Human: Discover how the Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs Human Factors team is helping to deliver a superior user experience Alcatel-Lucent is committed to helping operators deliver a superior user experience. One of the ways to help is to gain an intimate understanding of end-user behavior and the Bell Labs Human Factors team is one of the many groups within Alcatel-Lucent doing just that. The team is made up of Ph.D.s with an average of 15+ years professional usability experience working to: What would your response be to this scenario: you’re watching television and you forget that it’s being distributed to you on the Internet. Who won? TV or the Web? James McQuivey covers television and media technologies for Forrester Research. He spoke with PodTech’s Jason Lopez about the current state of ... The trend right now is to create your own social network for your business. Why do that? A few reasons. First, it lets you build better relationships with your customers. Second, you can add value onto your products or services by having a community that’s supporting each other and You might remember from our Stone Soup video that our little eco-village has started to cull our chicken flock to make room for new birds. For the last 2 months we’ve been learning what it takes to be mother hens and raise two dozen newly hatched chics. Jay and ... Why is it that when raw-food health gurus go on national television, talking about all the wonderful soups, rich entrees, and magical desserts you can have on a raw food diet, so often they end up handing over to the excited and anticipating host a glass full of green glop? ... Gordon Moore’s Law will remain in effect for the foreseeable future. Intel Corporation’s new 45nm Penryn microprocessor relies on a new recipe that combines the element Hafnium and metal gate technology to increase performance and significantly reduce eco-unfriendly, wasteful electricity leaks. Is Flash remaining a secure choice for web service? Will AIR and multi-tenant architecture from Salesforce.com become the industry standard for customer relationship management? In the first episode of Force.com’s Chalk Talk, Adam Gross presented Salesforce.com’s demo and in part two he introduces James Ward (Technical Evangelist) from ... Mike Krasnow, F5 Networks’ Product Marketing Manager, discusses BIG-IP version 9. Krasnow explains the benefits that organizations can expect by upgrading from version 4. In version 9, F5 has taken a quantum leap ahead with both their software architecture and hardware platforms to ensure that ... Charlene Li is a senior analyst at Forrester Research on social media and related technologies. She talks about some of the mistakes big brands are making on social network platforms such as Facebook, and the challenges they face. From the recent Graphing Social Patterns conference. One of the most unique social networks I’ve seen lately is the one from BluePulse. It’s for mobile phones only and is gaining a lot of fans. Last week I headed over to see what Ben Keighran, founder and CEO is up to and get a look at the ... In part two of the Dreamforce07 keynote, Robert Thurman and George Lucas open their conversation up to personal insights and philosophies around education, survival and knowledge. As part of an ecosystem, what roles will innovation and technology take on? As populations grow and diversity increases globally, will the ... In this podcast from LSI, listen in as Mike Gurin and Bruce Grieshaber offer an IT-level perspective on using mixed-drive environments to take advantage of Serial Attached SCSI performance and SATA high-volume/low-cost solutions. They cover using Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) as to scale a SATA topology, mixing hard disk ... The second-best selling car in Europe (only behind the VW Golf), the Opel Astra, is coming to America under the Saturn brand. The vehicle is expected to arrive on American shores in early 2008, and get this, for around $15k! Fully loaded, you can expect it to ... We have quick profiles of two companies that launched at the TechCrunch40 conference last week. Metaplace lets users build their own virtual worlds and put them on their Websites. Founder Raph Koster takes us through a demo. And Musicshake is a Korea-based service that lets users create ... In the wake of the deaths of two New York City Fire Fighters at an abandoned building near Ground Zero, the issue of interoperable broadband communications for first responders has once again taken center stage. But some are asking why it is still an issue six years later. To get some ... In Europe, consumers have demonstrated their willingness to “Shop their Values,” resulting in an accelerated adoption of Clean Technologies in the marketplace. But consumers in the United States still lag behind. What is the role of the consumer in forcing “Big Oil” and other incumbents in the Clean Tech space ... Big Oil and the incumbents in the Clean Tech space have the biggest balance sheets on the face of the planet. They have shown record profits as demand for oil increases globally. Two of the most astute observers of investment in Clean Tech, Paul Deninger (vice chairman of Jefferies and ... As we enter a multi-decade energy buildout for the next 40 percent of the people on the planet moving into the industrial age, investors in the clean tech space are looking at multi-trilion dollar markets for emerging technologies. Is this the biggest sweepstakes in human history? Two of the most ... You’ve heard how Digital Research flubbed the operating system deal with IBM. You’ve heard lots of old-time industry stories in our previous two conversations with Tom Rolander who was Gary Kildall’s best friend and operating system pioneer at Digital Research. But now let’s take a walking tour around Pacific ... Is it a cell phone or a VOIP phone? It’s both. T-Mobile has a new phone that lets you talk via their regular mobile network or connect to a WiFi hotspot at home or on the go. Larry Magid takes it out for a spin.The Reboot: The Death of the Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player
Bell Labs Human Factors
Is TV the New TV?
Talking about your own social network with Pringo CTO
showing ...Raising Chics from Scratch
Freshtopia.net - Green Smoothie 2.0
The Reboot: NBA 2k8 Review
Intel Ships New 45nm Penryn Chip
Force.com Chalk Talk: Salesforce.com, Adobe and StakeWare part 2
F5's Big-IP v9 - Time to Migrate
Big brands on Facebook: What doesn't work
BluePulse has a new take on social networking: mobile only!
"The Next Big Thing" part 2
Listen In #2
Opel Astra Coming to America
Metaplace and Musicshake demo at TechCrunch40
Tom Ridge on Interoperable Communications Cyber Security
What is the Role of the Consumer in Accelerating Change Towards Clean Tech?
What Will It Take for Big Oil and the Incumbents in Clean Tech to Change?
Is Clean Tech the Biggest Sweepstakes in Human History?
Part III of conversations with Tom Rolander
T-Moblie Wi-Fi Phone
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Copyright ©2008 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Modified: Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:21:23 -0700