Slashdot Mirror
Network Management Outsourced to India
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "The latest wrinkle for outsourcing companies in India is long-distance monitoring of corporate computer networks in U.S. and Europe -- services that could be worth tens of billions of dollars, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'Growth is expected as factories become more computerized and remote services expand to include controlling plant temperatures from afar and even monitoring who enters and exits the premises. 'Theoretically,' says Azim Premji, chairman and founder of India outsourcing company Wipro Ltd., 'anything on a network can be managed remotely from India.'"
Great idea until you have one of them patch a server and it doesn't come backup. If you can't get feet on the ground within an hour then you are useless.
Look at the picture in the article. I've seen happier faces behind the counter at McDonalds. You can have those jobs India.
http://religiousfreaks.com/>
>'Growth is expected as factories become more computerized and remote services expand to include controlling plant temperatures from afar and even monitoring who enters and exits the premises. Theoretically,' says Azim Premji, chairman and founder of India outsourcing company Wipro Ltd., 'anything on a network can be managed remotely from India.'"
"Practically", say several million skript kiddies, crackers, and Slashdotters, "anything on a network that can be managed remotely from India, won't remain on a network for very much longer. And it's spelled 'Hilarity', not 'Growth'".
"Theoretically," says Azim Premji, chairman and founder of India outsourcing company Wipro Ltd., "anything on a network can be managed remotely from India."
Oh really? I learned a LOT of theory based ideas in school, but once I entered the working world, the REAL world, things were vastly different.
Become a plumber, house painter, doctor, whatever. It's probably going to be a long while before teleporting works well enough to take house repair and similar work overseas.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Let's outsource the military. Let's outsource the politicians. Let's outsoruce the police.
oh wait.
Maybe outsourcing is a bad idea.
Maybe globalism is a big mistake.
You can hardly get good managed services when the dude is beside the boxes, good luck with that remote hooha. Also, as others have pointed out if the network is truly down down down, they're powerless.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
1)WHy the fuck do you have a manager for 3 people? IF thats common, your company is fucked.
2)If they didn't do anything, you had too large a staff for your size of an organization.
and of course
3)Good luck when servers break.
4)Good luck protecting your company secrets. EMployees have some risk, but foreign companies that may have many more people and minimal oversite (and completely different laws) are a huge risk.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Some positions can be done affectively remotely but when it comes to networking you really want people to stay put especially in terms of security. Unless a PTP link between here and India has gone down dramatically in price. Got to love adding attack vectors to a network to save money.
I work for a very large international company that does network monitoring for large enterprise clients. We monitor from Toronto, Boulder, Rochester and Bangalore. The support we get from the group in India is no worse that the support that is delivered from North America.
As long as we're not using Tivoli, everything is fine.
Theoretically, anything on a network that can be managed remotely from India can also be managed by an expert system running on a CPU on that network... without the added expense of long distance communication and employees, and without the added failure modes of having your international links go down. Plus, the programming for the expert system should be around the same magnitude of difficulty as writing the scripts for the Indians to follow, and anything either one of them doesn't recognize is going to get escalated to a higher-up anyway. So why is outsourcing network management to a person in another country a big win over outsourcing to a machine? Neither one of them is capable of pushing the damn reset button!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Unfortunately, companies haven't figured out that CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and CTOs can be outsource too. Most of these fuckers are worthless anyway. Given that the typical CEO in the U.S. makes over 400 times the salary of the average worker in his company, think of the savings! Get some guy in India to do it for like 30k a year.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
Have you ever noticed that you get a WORSE level of service over the phone (or otherwise remotely) than in person? Sure you have! Here is the reason: There exists LESS accountability. /. posters have pointed out), HARDWARE fails too.
For exmaple, when I have the ability to drive down the street and GET IN TO SOMEONES FACE if I am not satisfied with a product or service, you know what? I tend to get better service!
Thats what network management is, a service.
Any manager with half a brain would not do this. They would realize that (as other
Lesson; you need good local people!! Always have, always will.
All your corporate secrets can be sold on the internet to the highest bidder.
Of course, some businesses don't need security, and don't give a stuff about the security of their employees records. So they needn't worry about their corporate data being accessible to anyone with a packet sniffer and some open source decryption software. And anyway, the American government has probably already collected and leaked their secrets, and the UK government is probably passing a law at this very moment requiring all secrets everywhere to be held on a database in Novosibirsk (sp?) on a computer owned by hackers.ru (but with Tony Blair having your GPG key for safety).
Thinks... Maybe I should not mix the coffee with brandy)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
This is a good idea for some companies, and a bad idea for some companies. Don't be so quick to assume that every company that implements such a program is instantly going to have all their systems go down in flames. Some companies will have good experiences, and some may have bad experiences. We're seeing comments in both directions in this very discussion thread.
I'm sure that companies that outsource their network administration have an emergency lifeline in case of severe problems. It would probably be most cost-effective to have your main network administration in India, but have a local company (which contracts its services to multiple companies) only for problems that require a physical presence.
However, if your company's system experiences truly earth-shattering complications on a regular basis, maybe you ought to be outsourcing your network administration to Indian professionals who offer a tenfold talent-per-dollar increase over your existing resources. If nothing else, it's a better value for the 300 days out of the year when all the servers need is some remote babysitting.
This is freaking IN-SANE! These people are not all our friends and assumes we will always be allies. Imagine the opening shot in a future conflict being data networks and phones at thousands of businesses shutting down at once. All your web searches being re-routed because the corporate fucktards at Bellsouth decided to save a few pennies letting Indian support centers handle large chunks of their network maintenance.
I'm not saying Indian admins are reckless or incompetent. I'm saying that it's a bad idea to turn over too much control of our information resources over to a foreign country, just like it's a bad idea to depend on a fragile line of oil tankers connecting us to a bunch of wild-eyed goat herders for our transportation fuel and trusting the Chinese and Koreans with all our manufacturing capability. If push comes to shove they'll do what their government tells them to do. This is all going to come around to bite us in the ass one of these days.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
every time i call some tech line and they say their name is bob or chris or dave it tell them to stop lieing to me .. and ask them what their real name is.. Usually they tell me or they hang up
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
It's been about 5 years so my experience isn't current, but unless they've suddenly become highly trained, clueful, and motivated, I can't see this being any more successful than the other failed outsourcing to India attempts. The software developers over there working on our projects ignored requirements, standards, and schedules. They were hard to communicate with (culturally _and_ linguistically), and timing was of course always delayed because they're not working when you need to talk to them.
So, of course, they're cheaper, and people will go with them. Eventually they'll either fail, or get smart, and need someone local. By then they'll hire whoever India is outsourcing _their_ stuff to. There's whole continents we haven't started to do this with, yet.
Question: What do you do when the network goes down?
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
For now. Where are you going to outsource to in a couple of years when India catches up to us in terms of median income, or at least matches Japan's median income? China? Sorry, incomes there are rising quickly as well. You show me a major outsourcing "partner" country, and I'll show you a country with a 10% to 30% inflation rate and will be matching us in median income in well under a decade. Oh and by the way, not only are you funding your future competitor, you are committing treason AND hurting your children's future here in the States. Enjoy offshoring!
Oh, and when your network actually goes down (nice that it's being remotely monitored, better hope your offshored paper MCSE doesn't change anything), you're fucked. You could try calling your former IT staff, but they'll probably just give you the bird.
Companies haven't "figured it out" yet because the CEO picked the VP of HR who's negotiating his pay package, oh and the CEO's probably also the chairman of the board, too. He's probably on the board of three other companies with half of those guys, and they all play golf together and light each others' cigars with $100 bills.
Anyone with the power to "figure it out" and do something about it has absolutley zero incentive to do so. Nice, huh?
This is the point where you should be asking yourself "how do I become a CEO?"
This is an intelligence test people. If you do not get the next step that is the obvious solution to managers who came up with the idea of outsourcing then congrats. You are an idiot.
The solution to the problems that arise when you outsource the management of your non-outsourced systems? Outsource the systems.
TADA!
Why not? They are outsourcing everything else aren't they?
And don't think outsourcing is anything new either. How many of you work in companies that have their own cantina's. Used to be a member of the company meaning they had heart for the business and were for instance willing to work overtime along with the other workers.
Been outsourced to special companies meaning nowadays it is all the same generic crap with zero attention to the specific needs of the company. Like for instance making the cooking equipment available to people having to work the nightshift.
Offcourse now everyone is crying because it is their job that is going away. If you didn't protest when the thee lady was outsourced then don't expect anyone to protest because your job is going away.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
When we see a headline titled "Management outsourced to India" then we will finally see some kind of pressure put to stop this.
But seriously, why wouldn't a 30k per year, indian masters in business administration manager be able to manage just as effectively as a 4 million dollar per year manager (and hey- he'd have better contacts with the new movers and shakers).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"The reason you pay $9 for an asprin at a US hospital is because once every few years, the asprin fails to fix someone's headache. Then the person sues for $20 million."
That's only part of the problem. You can play wack-a-mole trying to find all the symptoms. Or you can get to the core problem. Our "save me at all costs" mentality. A lot of our problems stem from that attitude.
Could be... but in that case they could (and should) have just let the manager go, and cut costs to nearly where they are now, AND had 3 people onsite... far far better than what they accomplished with outsourcing.
Interesting how the same folks who complain about losing jobs to Inda/China/wherever are wearing Nikes made in Philipines and listening to an iPod made in China and are probably running a Finnish OS on a computer mainly made in Taiwan or Korea. There's nothing special about geek jobs. They're the same as any other jobs. If they can be shipped overseas and done cheaper --- well that's what is going to happen. The only way to avoid this is to keep ahead of the pack or to get a job that can't be relocated (for now anyway). Crying about it does not help.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
As an Indian, trying to work out some remote management stuff, I'd say you're mostly right on the IPSec part - which is why we're using OpenVPN site-to-site tunnels. Much easier to setup and ensure security.
/., we know what technologies are available, and we're not afraid of using those technologies.
And even though we're in India, we've heard of ssh, and OpenSSH. We've even heard of OpenBSD, cue *shock*, *horror*.
Managing things over the VPN --> no DMZ accessible login services (other than ssh, openVPN).
RRD and SNMP would be stored locally on-site. The only time it would get to us would be when we actually need to check something. So no, the bandwidth usage is not going to be that high.
And we don't send passwords via plain-text email, we either call the passwords in through the phone or since we're in through the VPN anyway, setup local secure communication and use that.
Seriously, we're not idiots, we read
Next step is Xen and virtualisation for some of what we do. Oh, I'm in an Indian startup, and we're trying to mainly target the Indian market. Any spill-over into the American/European market will be additional revenue. Also, given the cost structures we are targetting here, there will be no company in the US which can compete with us - on cost. And whatever is done technologically, it will take us but 6 months to catch up. Assuming of course we haven't done it already.
Have fun!
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
The main problem with outsourcing right now has nothing to do with "ohhhh... scary foreigners get to do what we used to do!"
Wrongo. It is trying to compete with people who's cost of living is 1/6th ours. The cost to fill up a given neuron with info is simply far cheaper there. Brains are becomming a cheap commodity instead of something prized. If this is not an earth-shattering paradigm change in terms of careers and education, I don't know what is.
Table-ized A.I.
"I'd rather have our system than the free-for-all (aka ****-em-all) system of the USA, where you have to pay up or die on the sidewalk."
Then, immediately, you say:
"Now if only we could be a little more selective about WHO we treat for free; kick those welfare ***-kissers out!"
I apologize if I missed some sarcasm, but your statements don't seem to make any sense.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.