Verizon CIO Taking It To Vendors
from the save-more,-save-more dept
Chris writes “This is scary if your business is based on selling to large corporations. Verizon is really squeezing its vendors. I’m sure the others are doing the same thing – or will soon.” The WSJ article is a profile of Verizon’s CIO and his intense focus on squeezing their technology vendors as much as possible. It talks about how he relies on eBay as a “stock market for servers” and tells his staff to make sure they get lower prices than what’s available on eBay. Basically, he’s driving down prices by relying on open information. The more information you have as a buyer, the better position you’re in – and Verizon seems to be doing that to an extreme point. The one thing that I wonder about, though, when a company is so focused on “cutting costs” is that they begin to forget about the other side of the equation: the benefits that those costs were supposed to bring. You can cut all your costs if you shut down the company, but the reason you’re in business is because you think you can take the assets you have and create a bigger return. So, when a company is entirely focused on cutting costs, they often end up cutting too deep, and losing out on the ability to make a bigger return for their shareholders.
Comments on “Verizon CIO Taking It To Vendors”
Verizon computer systems are terrible - no reason
Their computer systems for ordering service interact with each other to cause complete havoc. Your orders can be cancelled four times in a row, doubled, lost, etc. We finally found somebody who would help us there through a special phone number set up for the New York Software Industry Association (many members had other problems with them). The first thing he did was to sit and wait for the computer systems to stop interacting. This is something to be proud of?
The technicians do not have cell phones. They use outdated black and white screen technology and have to ask their customers for permission to connect the terminal to log their orders and find out what they are doing next.