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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/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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I've seen the same - when the company in the US insists on hiring only low-dollar employees. Then the work out of the US is pretty much the same as what you'd get from India. Simply because highly experienced (> 5-10 years) Indian technologies are so rare.
Of course, a company *could* just follow the wisdom from the Mythical Man Month (published when? 1966?) in which the author (project manager for OS development on first mainframe) stated that there was a 7:1 difference in productivity between best & mediocre developers. Since then Gates stated he thought more sophisticated technology has increased the ratio to 100:1.
But lets assume the more conservative number of 7:1:
- so for about 50% additional cost (higher salary), you can get 600% additional productivity
- so the work being done by a team of 100 mediocre system & network admins could probably be perform by 15 really sharp engineers (~80% savings)
- so the cost savings of just moving to available sharp engineers in the US would exceed the cost savings of shipping work to India (which is now often calculated at merely 25-50% savings best case)
But that would require insightful management - capable of learning from well established lessons of 40 years ago. Kind of a hopeless proposition at some companies. And apparently the 7:1 difference in productivity doesn't apply to managment. Aha, that's the ticket - outsource the low-skilled management!
returned to India after his J1 visa waiver expired.
Therein lies another problem. These highly skilled folks have to jump through all sorts of hoops and pay mounds of cash to get the same residence/citizenship rights as some loser living off the government. What the fuck?
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!