Esprit Stays Focused

At Esprit de Corp., a key management strategy is to focus on the design and distribution of women's fashions, swimsuits, shoes, purses, and kids clothes. To stay in line with this goal, Esprit CIO Janet Damen recently began using an automated computer- and network-management service that lets the company stick to its areas of expertise and leave oversight of IT operations to systems specialists.

The San Francisco designer of mass-market fashions was the first company to sign up for Systems Management Specialists' Global Enterprise Management System, a comprehensive set of IT management services that includes remote monitoring of the IT infrastructure. The vendor designed its system largely to meet the needs of companies, such as Esprit, that have small IT staffs and would prefer to devote IT resources to issues that affect key sales and product strategies. More...