Gareth Stokes
Gareth Stokes is a Partner at DLA Piper, focussing on information technology, outsourcing and intellectual property-driven contracts. Gareth’s experience spans numerous complex major procurement and sourcing projects within heavily regulated industries. Most such engagements involve elements of service delivery on-shore, with other elements delivered further afield, whether nearshore within the newer EU member states or offshore in India, China and emerging economies. These projects tend to involve innovative contractual structures, including joint venture arrangements, multi-level framework and call off structures, trust arrangements and other multi-contract arrangements.
From this author
Of all the jargon and buzzwords beloved of IT professionals – “the cloud”, “SaaS”, “web 2.0” and an infinity of others – “Big Data” is the most alluringly easy to misunderstand. Whilst big data systems do entail a large volume of data, the real benefits come from the speed (or ‘velocity’) of accumulation, and the array of different types of data (or ‘variety’) that are collected and analysed....
Anyone with even a passing interest in technology will be well used to the claim that a particular IT system – some combination of hardware and software – is “clever technology”. Similarly, synonyms for intelligence have been appended as a prefix or suffix by every IT vendor’s marketing department to add an extra sparkle to their latest technology. As consumers we are living in a world of smartphones, smartwatches, smartTVs and smart kitchen appliances, and the...
The traditional view of outsourcing has tended to see cost reduction as one of the primary drivers for any customer. The idea that the ‘total cost of ownership’ of a particular business function over the term of the outsourcing contract should be lower is very often part of the business case. Similarly, seeing outsourcing as a means of transforming a collection of assets on the balance sheet into a recurring service charge, and reducing (or at least apparently reducing) capital...