India’s Outsourcing Firms Change Direction as ‘Cloud’ Moves In

http://www.wsj.com/articles/indias-outsourcing-firms-change-direction-as-cloud-moves-in-1436740981

by fspeech • 11 years ago

35 24 11 years ago

hliyan• 11 years ago

Paywalled. Says "To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In", but in reality, a subscription is necessary.

Copy the URL, Google it, and click the link, it should open full article (see previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531941 or read this: https://umur.io/paywall-bypass-bookmarklet-come-from-google/).

* Edit: Removed: "go to Google, Search", added: Google it. Aside: stupid me.

achow• 11 years ago

For those who are interested in knowing about the working behind this Life Pro Tip - It works because of Google's 'First click free' arrangement with the newspapers.

First click free: We've worked with subscription-based news services to arrange that the very first article seen by a Google News user (identifiable by referrer) doesn't require a subscription. Although this first article can be seen without subscribing, any further clicks on the article page will prompt the user to log-in or subscribe to the news site.

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543

cies• 11 years ago

Let's make it mandatory to put a [paywall] tag in cases like this.

known2• 11 years ago

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2015/07/13/under-a-cloud-...

dkarapetyan2• 11 years ago

The whole thing itself is kinda confused about what exactly the cloud has to do with outsourcing. Going to the cloud doesn't magically get rid of programmers. It just means you might have one or two fewer people because you don't need to worry about managing the actual hardware. Writing the software, maintaining it, patching it, etc. still needs to happen. Overall, more sensational than it really needs to be. The fact that Big Corp. is figuring out how to have a leaner IT operation is a good thing but they were bloated to begin with and are just catching up. Not really news to anyone who has seen those things.

asadlionpk• 11 years ago

I think cloud here means products like Freshbooks, basecamp, salesforce, etc. Big companies were previously outsourcing dev + support to these to Indian companies (and were bloated, also bad software, constant dev cycles fixing things) but are now turning towards these "0-programmer required" cloud apps. Which is essentially causing this decline.

dkarapetyan2• 11 years ago

Ok, that makes more sense. The article definitely misses the mark then.

thewarrior• 11 years ago

50 % of Indian IT is not development but "infrastructure management" which is just monitoring servers etc.

With all the infrastructure being outsourced to the cloud and being managed by super small teams and highly efficient algorithms half of the business of Indian IT has stopped growing.

On the other hand you have companies like IPSoft which automate monitoring your own infrastructure.

The third blow is from things like Salesforce etc.

Altogether it could be a bit of a major blow to growth in Indian IT. Because it never really competed on technical strength but only on cost . Now all the low cost work is vanishing and they're forced to somehow transition to 100 % dev work with the poor quality of devs they have (on average) .

The article is a bit poor as it doesn't shed light on these aspects.

We definitely need better articles on this subject as it's effects on India are going to be huge.

jajaBinks• 11 years ago

I think what they mean is that IT Outsourcing that specifically involved deploying, installing, upgrading, configuring tools and software is being disrupted by cloud, because you don't need to worry about a lot of such things any more. Like bringing up 20 windows machines, and installing SQL Server, .NET Framework, and domain join the machines used to be a 2 day affair, not so with Azure. Nothing to do with outsourced software development. The cloud may actually boost outsourcing in that area.

abrookewood3• 11 years ago

Yeah, this is how I read it. With AWS, you just click a few buttons or upload a template and you get what you need. Infrastructure as code completely takes away a bunch of work that used to be outsourced to India.

honest_joe• 11 years ago

They do not change the direction they simply kill the jobs and have been doing this for decades (disclaimer i am not an american nor wester european and am in similar position of being a cheap eastern european workforce)

yask123• 11 years ago

To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In :\

srikz• 11 years ago

Do a google search of the tile and then click on that link to access the full article.

Edit: Just saw that guruparan18 has already posted the solution

L-four• 11 years ago

Probably garbage anyways.

codeonfire• 11 years ago

Web-based services make it difficult to bilk customers because there is no way to increase costs. The rate is fixed ahead of time. The service either works or it doesn't. There is no possibility of hardware problems, software rework, configuration issues, overbilling, etc. There are no contract negotiation or lowball bidding games (and subsequent cost overruns) either because services are pay as you go. Outsourcers will have to either invent new corporate IT products that are not provided as services yet or build competing services.

drcross• 11 years ago

Network Engineers will rejoice at this. As the network becomes more depended upon QOS manipulation and failover link management comes to the fore.

abrookewood3• 11 years ago

Sorry, but I disagree - and my background is in networking. With AWS or Azure, no one cares about the network or servers. The only thing required is a decent link connecting you to the cloud and you are done. No one is going to hire network engineers to manage such a reduced portfolio.

Spooky23• 11 years ago

No way.

In my experience managing a very large enterprise cloud environment, the main interaction that we have with the networking teams (beyond standard NOC/ops) is dealing with self-inflicted wounds (proxy issues, etc).

I wouldn't want to be a network engineer now.

bluedino• 11 years ago

Managed service providers, Indian or not, will still offer to manage your cloud-based services for you. And IT managers will still pay them to.

My last network admin job a couple years back had outsourced their email and spam filtering (two separate services, don't ask me why) to a local MSP. This made absolutely zero sense to me.

Instead of simply logging into the web control panel of the respective service to add a new email address, check the spam filter for a message...instead you had to log into the MSP website and create a service ticket so they would do it, wait for a reply...

jiraaya• 11 years ago

I am not sure how much of actual "work" is going to vanish. My premise is that "work" is going to be relocated but not eliminated. Moving to cloud is not as easy as drag and drop. Netflix had to do plenty of re-work (and write a bunch of very cool tools along the way) to achieve it.

The problem comes from legacy systems. They are very real and very slow moving. People do not want to alter them as that may involve re-tooling their entire ecosystem. If they do want to migrate to cloud (eventually), they would have to deal with all the additional complexity of a hybrid cloud eco-system.

Where cloud is a huge win though is lowering the entry barrier for start-ups. More start-ups are getting more things done at lesser cost and lesser time than ever before. These are exciting times for innovation.

known2• 11 years ago

TCS/Wipro/Infosys are not selling software; They're selling 'software engineers' to US/UK clients;

India’s Outsourcing Firms Change Direction as ‘Cloud’ Moves In

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