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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.'"
Your saying that things can be managed remotely.. on a network. WE NEED TO ALL FEAR FOR OUR JOBS! FIRST ROBOTS NOW THIS!
oh wait.... wasn't this story first posted on CHIPS & DIPS like a thousand years ago?
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
Who in their right mind would do this other than a bean counter ???? I work in this shit every day and am sick and tired of dealing with offshore data-admin-development centers. I call and speak with "Bob" and tell him i need a restore of a local GMP server .... and yet as always its a big friggin hassle...and never gets done properly .... ack.... i need to grow crops or paint houses for a living....this ain't working..... but it never ceases to amaze me the idiots that think this is a "good" idea and beneficial for the company.......
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
I was talking with a middle manager for a European cell phone company the other month. She was telling me that production was in China, most of support was in China, and they were moving R&D to China as well because by that point the Chinese engineer knew where that particular technology was going. So I said, "Basically you're a subsidiary of a Chinese company then". She told me that it was the other way around, and we argued about it for a while. What I found interesting is that the company had basically no product-line positions left, all they were hiring was sales and marketing.
China Threatens Inda Eminence
Achille Talon
Hop!
But it's much tougher--if not downright impossible--to remotely improve that network.
Organizations who are interested in outsourcing are also generally interested in growing their business; and when they grow, so does their infrastructure, including their networks, both in size and complexity. Expanding a network involves a tremendous number of physical resources and processes, including obtaining and installing cable, routers, servers, software, etc. Trust me, you want to have a knowledgeable network staff *on-site* to coordinate such a movement. I suppose that someone across the ocean could simply call up contractors to install all of this stuff, but the cost in time and efficiency, especially during the troubleshooting phase, would be enormous.
If your company wishes to maintain a stagnant network--one that can't adapt to the growth of their company; then by all means, outsource all your network management. Just hope your hardware never breaks.
How much do you TRUST a 3rd party to be the keepers of your company's critical data? Because once you've chosen that, you really have no other security options.
I wouldn't panic to much. Globalisation is allmost once around the globe by now. It only takes so long for countries to arrive at a simular level as others. Especially when both are racing for the true bottom line. The ones from the top and the others from the bottom. Ten years ago Taiwan was the lowest bidder in the bicyce business. Now their luxury and the bikes are built in vietnam. Not before long Gary Fisher will have a team welding somewhere in the US again.
Do what's fun. Do it good. Tell people about it. The rest just happens. Meanwhile you can offer writing procedures for network admining for outsourced admin services. At a more specialized rate that is.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The middle and upper levels of management will follow because frankly, distance does matter, despite what Wipro think. Eventually they will be wholly Chinese companies owned by foreign shareholders. I don't really have a problem with this, it pushes the chinese economy up, makes them more expensive.
It'll level out, the important thing is to allow the currencies to float freely, which isn't happening at the moment. That's what you should be complaining about to your MP/representative.
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I have a friend who had such a contract.
They had nice service penalties for bad service.
Then came the day that all technicians were busy fixing things at other companies and so the service company just paid them the penalty and said they would send out a tech when one became available. It was a couple days later. It cost them a couple hundred grand in those two days and they were lucky at that.
If the failure had been around tax time, the service agreement fines they had with their own customers for failure to produce required documents could have been quite large.
So if you are going to do your business this way, you need to legally account for the fact that if there is a big spike, your entire company could be down for over 24 hours until your "time-share" tech becomes available.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Exactly. I worked as an ASIC developer for several networking companies and a medical imaging company. Then the industry in the U.S. went tits up. I'm now getting my electrical and plumbing licenses (my boss is a master plumber and master electrician). I'll make more as a tradesman than I ever did as an engineer. My job can't be outsourced. It's damn tough to get a license in Massachusetts so imports will be difficult.
It's tough work but in the long run will be worth more than my BSEE from BU. Well, sorta. One of the companies I worked for was a mostly successful startup.
My days are more fulfilling, I will end up making more money, and I can take my work anywhere if I decide to move. We don't work in the new construction industry - we work on service and installation of high-efficiency heating and A/C systems so there will always be work. Why waste time with tech anymore?
get your artificial hips, knees, bypass surgery or whatever else done in a day, no hassles over any insurance, and be back in a week after checking out the Taj Mahal
Look, your ankle, fine. But any hospital that discharges me fast enough after a bypass surgery to be able to see the Taj Mahal and make it back to the US is so not a hospital I want to deal with. Nor do I want to deal with the pain of joint-replacement operations while stuck in an airplane for 17 hours. The agony after one of those is terrible, do I want to have to deal with turbulence and airplane nausea? The physical therapy after a joint replacement is grueling and even more painful. Do I want to have to do that without my surgical team close enough for consult or referral?
>> plumber
Taken over by illegal immigrants. You can't compete with them on price if you want to earn more than minimum wage and stay legal. And since it's price, not quality, people are looking for these days, you can't compete at all.
>>house painter
Same as plumber.
>>doctor
Yes, but competition is insane and it's next to impossible to get in unless you plan for that career from high school. Plus, just watch as congress declares 'shortage' of doctors and nurses(because the professions are too hard and expensive to get in the U.S.) and allows dozens of thousands of them to come from India, Mexico, China, whatever, possibly after completing a brief course in specifics of the U.S. healthcare. Human body works the same everywhere, so it's only the legal barriers, not lack of skills that prevents them from coming here. I'd certainly be for such solution. If these assholes want cheap computers and IT, I want cheap healthcare, their jobs be damned.
The point is that virtually no occupation is safe from "globalization" bullshit unless protected by sane employment and immigration laws. Just like at the beginning of the last century, people were being ruined by unrestricted capitalism until sane employment protections were implemented.
Where are those mod-points when you need them!
he was an orthopaedic who got his postgrad training at the Harvard Medical School and then returned to India after his J1 visa waiver expired.
Wow...what a coincedence, the guy I just talked to on the phone with my DSL provider is from India and he has a pHd from Harvard. There must be millions of Harvard grads in India!
After many decades of English subjug^H^H^H^H partnership with India, Indians are far to expensive and skilled for operations work. It's much better to use such an well known and educated work force for research and development. What a crime it would be to make PhDs push buttons and monitor mind numbing panels for a living. It would be better for them to stay home like their US counterparts, and they will have to if they keep get much more expensive.
For operations work, we need the educated and inexpensive discipline that can be found in all the former Soviet territories. The people who built and named the Kurks obviously have the discipline and razor sharp focus demanded for the job. Moreover there's great economic need for such a thing. I hear there are still many people displaced and unemployed by the Chernobyl dissaster. Remote operations of Nuclear power plants is just the break they need. Due to circumstances beyond anyone's control, they are cheaper than the happily employed people who live next to you. Just think of the savings and how much more money people like Neutron Jack deserve. Their compensation is hardly enough for all the hard exercise they get. Expect the paper value of such forward looking companies as GE, NBC and Microsoft to skyrocket.
Ten years ago, I read a joke but some people must have taken it litterally. The joke was, a clever executive noticed the value of their company increased 10% every time they fired five percent of their workforce. The bold executive soon got into a boasting contest with others. Everyone was fired and the Dow hit 10,000. Oh yeah, well just own all the ideas other people come up with and implement that will work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
When people lose their jobs, one of the first things they cut is going out to eat, then it's new toy buying, then they start to default on old debt, using the cheaper credit cards, then they start to dodge the mortgage or rent and utilities, then it's living on the street. I've seen it happen to folks, roughly around the 6 to 9 months un or underemployed level most folks are completely hosed.
Eventually the US will lose so many wealth creation type jobs that the remaining "service" type jobs will become obsolete because they fall into the "want" category rather than the "necessity" category. then we are all screwed, and it will be too late to get revenge on the conmen CEO and wall street hucksters heads on sticks because all of them will have fled the country to other places.
Most people are living in denial of this, but really, trading millions of jobs a year so a few very wealthy people can get even more wealthy was never a real smart idea, they just have control of the stock shilling media and access to bribe government because they have the largest sacks of cash to use. It's pathetic, and you can still see people defending the practice, despite every serious economic indicator showing that we have screwed up mightily.
The government keeps reclassifying jobs to make the employment stats look good (the parent burger flipping is now considered a "manufacturing" job). They stopped reporting most of the basic M3 money supply stats (because they have started printing cash by the truckload). They yanked critical normal living costs like food and energy from the consumer price index reports. They lowball and downplay all debt and consider the highest debt levels historically to somehow be "good". We have a LOWER average personal savings rate than during the Great Depression.
Man, there's a big list you can go down. Dollar dropping in global worth against most other major currencies. Stocks trading still at completely absurd fantasyland P and E ratios. Humongous wage disparity between grunts and higher level management, I mean off the scale with the past 200 years of averages. The percentage of actual productive workers in the economy as opposed to busywork "workers". HUGE bloated government bureaucracies, typically any agency will absorb around 2/3rds of every dollar spent on it with taxes just to *manage itself*, the public-service task the agency has to do comes way behind.
On and on.
It's GONE. The second Great Depression has already started by any rational indicator or analysis, what is left is media spin, expanded credit, and an increasingly hysterical and irrational government that is now going around the world labeling anything they don't like as a terrorist threat, and passing laws as fast as they can to make every internal citizen "guilty" of something or another so they can have total firm control.
These guys at the top aren't that stupid, they know it's here and will get worse, these guys are looters and they know full well what the looting will be doing to the US, so this is damage control for the future so they can stay in power and in command and control. They can live with the US as a second world nation, they don't care, these high level folks travel to various developing nations and lack for nothing while there, they dig it, they love that extreme power they have over people when there is such a wealth disparity. They will still have mansions and planes and armies of mercenaries to protect them (cops or soldiers, no difference anymore so we should just stop with the pretending, and the looted money will partially go to pay for their personal bodyguards masquerading as "the good guys for law-n-order and democracy! drivel").
Their dream model is a global state with two classes of humans, a 1% master and 99% wage/serf/slave split, kept in place by a quite vigorus and draconian police state apparatus. We will still have technology of course, the masters want it and will order that it continues, but for the
That's not neccesarily true. While I'm not a big fan of outsourcing to India, I've been able to do my job (Unix Sysadmin and Network Admin before that) without entering a data center more than once or twice a year, and that usually to install new kit. Remote console access for teh win and all that. And if you do need physical access, you can keep one person around the company, or have support contracts with the hardware vendor, etc.
No, I think the bigger problem with Indian outsourcing remains customer service (internal variety). Customers generally feel more comfortable dealing with admins face to face and find it easier to describe their needs in person. Alternatively, I've seen cases where customers would yell and scream over the phone and demand to get their way, but would never do the same in person. "Bob" from India doesn't stand a chance when dealing with those kind of people, and the generally negative American view of offshoring won't help either.
I believe that the best areas for outsourcing/offshoring are those that don't have customer-facing responsibilities. Network management may or may not fit in this category, depending on your organisational structure.
This is ananthap from India.
Whats wrong with their faces? Except the colour of the skin? Seem to be a lot of dead serious techies in the middle of a busy shift.
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