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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.
...Until hardware starts to fail.
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/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.
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!
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?
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.
Please have the tireless generosity to note that all my future meta-moderation and precocious-buttock repartee will henceforth be conveyed to your worthy consideration by "Smitty" and "Pete" in Bangalore.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
It's beneficial for the exec doing the offshoring: lower costs this financial quarter = nice bonus and a better offer from another company.
I've seen this kind of thing over and over, and it usually benefits one person.
Man, you really need that seminar!
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.
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.
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.
I like to put my vital infrastructure in the place most likely to be involved in a nuclear war this decade.
Got a toll free number ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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
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?"
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.
Deleted
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!
More likely, it was three people working for 50k, and a manager raking in 350k to twiddle his thumbs and drink coffee. Welcome to America, where the people are bottomheavy and the businesses are topheavy!
Why exactly is a bad idea? Let me ask you a different question - why should government be outsourced to DC, Washington? Why should police enforcement be outsourced to the HQ two cities over? Why should the military be outsourced to Fort Bragg? Why should training of the federal police be outsourced to Quantico, Virginia?
Face it, outsourcing is already a way of life. The only difference between now and earlier is that the people to whom things get outsourced don't look like you, don't speak your language and keep different hours. And I'd argue that even that can also be said when you talk about outsourcing support centers from California to South Carolina.
The main problem with outsourcing right now has nothing to do with "ohhhh... scary foreigners get to do what we used to do!" It has everything to do with outsourcing being applied in the wrong places, unrealistic expectations of its benefits and there being little oversight and control exerted over the outsourced operations.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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!
"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.