Myth 1: Offshore outsourcing is costing U.S. jobs.
Myth 2: There’s a stigma to offshore outsourcing.
Myth 3: The cost benefits of outsourcing are overstated.
Myth 4: It’s a buyer’s market for IT workers right now anyway.
Myth 5: There are huge cultural barriers.
Myth 6: What about the other risks of outsourcing?
Myth 7: The ROI of outsourcing hasn’t been proved.
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Outsourcing is a source of stress, struggle and angst for many IT managers, and no wonder: More than half of outsourcing agreements end up prematurely terminated, according to a study released last year by DiamondCluster International Inc., a Chicago-based consulting firm. That leaves a lot of companies far from outsourcing nirvana, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We asked IT experts and veterans to talk about the bad decisions and faulty assumptions that can cause your outsourcing project to fall from grace. They came up with seven deadly sins.
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Country offers companies potential advantages, but uncertainties as well
In the competitive world of offshore outsourcing, Pakistan doesn’t get much attention. The main reasons can be found in any quick scan of news headlines about that country: terrorism and political instability, including two unsuccessful efforts to assassinate President Pervez Musharraf.
Nonetheless, Pakistan has a developing offshore IT services industry. And in many areas of the country, it’s business as usual.
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San Francisco (IDGNS) – Yahoo has acquired a stake in Indian Internet advertising company Tyroo Media to help it capture more of the country’s fast-growing online ad market.
Yahoo acquired between 35 percent and 50 percent of Tyroo for an undisclosed amount of money, said George Zacharias, managing director of Yahoo India, in a telephone interview Wednesday.
Tyroo, based in Gurgaon, places advertisements on a network of about 1,200 Web sites. Its service is suitable for smaller businesses, allowing them to design graphic or text-based ads and choose Web sites that will bring them a targeted audience, said Harish Bahl, CEO of Smile Interactive Technologies Group, of which Tyroo is a part.
The advertisers do not need to have their own Web sites — which small Indian businesses often do not have — since buyers can contact them via e-mail or SMS (short messaging service), he said.
Yahoo started its search-based advertising business in India about eight months ago and so far has a few thousand small advertisers, Zacharias said. There are millions of potential advertisers in India, which all the search companies and advertising networks are chasing, he added.
The deal with Tyroo will allow Yahoo to grow its business with third-party publishers in India while it prepares to bring its revamped advertising system, code-named Panama, into the country, along with technology it acquired from Right Media, Zacharias said.
Yahoo announced in April that it would buy the remainder of Right Media, an online exchange where advertisers and publishers can buy and sell display advertising on Web sites. The relationship with Tyroo will continue after the Panama and Right Media technologies are introduced to India, Zacharias said.
The companies will also integrate their back-end systems so that advertisers on Yahoo and Tyroo can access to each other’s networks, Bahl said. The companies will remain independent, however, he added.
Story Reproduced from Yahoo News.
NEW YORK – Web search and Internet services company Google Inc. on Friday began selling expanded online storage, aimed at users with large picture, music or video file collections.
The annual prices established were $20 for 6 gigabytes of online storage, $75 for 25 GB, $250 for 100 GB and $500 for 250 GB.Google said the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa and the e-mail service Gmail. The storage will soon also work with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which are the company’s word processing and spreadsheet applications.
Gmail users currently get nearly 3 GB of free storage while Picasa users get 1 GB. The expanded storage would kick in when a user runs out of free storage in a particular service.
Google has been adding about 145 megabytes of free storage to each e-mail account annually — a pace that would raise storage limits to more than 3.25 GB in three years. Instead of matching Yahoo and AOL, Google decided instead to charge for additional storage to users with extraordinary needs.
Most users, however, don’t even come close to reaching the free storage limits.
Story Reproduced from Yahoo News.
Wipro, which announced this week it was acquiring U.S. based infrastructure management services provider Infocrossing for $600 million, has plans to open several software development and IT services facilities in the U.S.In addition to a software development center that Wipro will open in Atlanta within the next three months, it’s also eyeing Raleigh, N.C., Austin, Texas and Richmond, Virginia as the locations for three additional new U.S. facilities, said Sridhar Ramasubbu, Wipro CFO for Americas and Europe in an interview.
Those facilities could open in the next year, but the company first wants to see “how it goes” when its Atlanta center opens by year’s end, Ramasubbu said. Wipro expects within three years to have about 1,000 American workers based in its Atlanta development center, he said.
Sierra Atlantic is the latest IT offshore outsourcing company to make a move on China. It announced Wednesday its acquisition of ArrAy Inc., a Boston-based software engineering services firm with 200 employees in Guangzhou and Shanghai. “China is a huge and very strategic market for our customers,” said Sierra Atlantic Chairman and CEO Raju Reddy. “Our manufacturing customers have a significant presence or plan to have one there.”
One of the world’s largest technology investment firms announced today that it will sink $48 million in private equity into DarwinSuzsoft, a Chinese company that specializes in IT outsourcing.The deal by Francisco Partners, which has $5 billion in capital, demonstrates the growing momentum in China as a destination for IT and business-process outsourcing. Francisco is known for such deals as its $200 million acquisition of software company FrontRange Solutions and sizable investments in Barracuda Networks and Primavera Systems.
“We think it’s the largest deal ever done for outsourcing and offshoring in China,” said DarwinSuzsoft CEO Dan Ross in an interview. “It’s not typical for a Chinese investment, but I think you’ll start to see more of this because the heat is growing rapidly in terms of the marketplace.”
A provider of spend management services says one of India’s largest outsourcers is holding its data hostage at an offshore location and is refusing to return the information unless legal claims against it are dropped.New York City-based The Buying Triangle also says that Infosys, through a subsidiary, exposed its customer data online and stole its business plans.
TBT hired Infosys BPO last year, when the unit was known as Progeon Ltd., to host, support, and maintain its P2P Smart spend management application. TBT customers access P2P Smart online to help analyze and reduce their purchasing costs.
The deal quickly went sour after TBT found that its customers were frequently unable to access P2P Smart because servers Infosys set up in Bangalore to host the application were frequently down, TBT alleges in a lawsuit it’s filed against Infosys BPO.
Today’s news of Hewlett-Packard buying Opsware for $1.6 billion cash shows how a lot of companies will look to automation to cut IT people, regardless of where in the world they work. Opsware helps companies automate tasks in large-scale data centers. Last week, BMC said it’s buying RealOps to give a major lift to its IT process automation tools.