Outsourcing Costs Swallowed to Ease BlackBerry Pain

摘要

You may be considering outsourcing the management of your mobile e-mail devices because of the valuable time they consume in your telecom department. The benefit: Less time spent on routine support tasks. The downside: You may be renegotiating your support contract every time a new function is added to the device. Regardless, Beam Global Spirits & Wine is within months of handing its BlackBerry Enterprise Server over to Affiliated Computer Services, a Dallas-based technology outsourcing vendor, says telecom manager Deb Bryant. The acquisition of another company and resulting overload on the Microsoft Exchange server necessitated the move, she says. Computer room requirements, Internet bandwidth and manpower reportedly made it cheaper to outsource than to host internally. Moving the Exchange server means moving the BES to Dallas, too, Bryant says, because the two servers have to be attached to avoid latency issues.