

India’s Outsourcing Firms Change Direction as ‘Cloud’ Moves In - fspeech
http://www.wsj.com/articles/indias-outsourcing-firms-change-direction-as-cloud-moves-in-1436740981

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dkarapetyan
The whole thing itself is kinda confused about what exactly the cloud has to
do with outsourcing. Going to the cloud doesn't magically get rid of
programmers. It just means you might have one or two fewer people because you
don't need to worry about managing the actual hardware. Writing the software,
maintaining it, patching it, etc. still needs to happen. Overall, more
sensational than it really needs to be. The fact that Big Corp. is figuring
out how to have a leaner IT operation is a good thing but they were bloated to
begin with and are just catching up. Not really news to anyone who has seen
those things.

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asadlionpk
I think cloud here means products like Freshbooks, basecamp, salesforce, etc.
Big companies were previously outsourcing dev + support to these to Indian
companies (and were bloated, also bad software, constant dev cycles fixing
things) but are now turning towards these "0-programmer required" cloud apps.
Which is essentially causing this decline.

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thewarrior
50 % of Indian IT is not development but "infrastructure management" which is
just monitoring servers etc.

With all the infrastructure being outsourced to the cloud and being managed by
super small teams and highly efficient algorithms half of the business of
Indian IT has stopped growing.

On the other hand you have companies like IPSoft which automate monitoring
your own infrastructure.

The third blow is from things like Salesforce etc.

Altogether it could be a bit of a major blow to growth in Indian IT. Because
it never really competed on technical strength but only on cost . Now all the
low cost work is vanishing and they're forced to somehow transition to 100 %
dev work with the poor quality of devs they have (on average) .

The article is a bit poor as it doesn't shed light on these aspects.

We definitely need better articles on this subject as it's effects on India
are going to be huge.

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bluedino
Managed service providers, Indian or not, will still offer to manage your
cloud-based services for you. And IT managers will still pay them to.

My last network admin job a couple years back had outsourced their email and
spam filtering (two separate services, don't ask me why) to a local MSP. This
made absolutely zero sense to me.

Instead of simply logging into the web control panel of the respective service
to add a new email address, check the spam filter for a message...instead you
had to log into the MSP website and create a service ticket so they would do
it, wait for a reply...

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hliyan
Paywalled. Says "To Read the Full Story, Subscribe _or_ Sign In", but in
reality, a subscription is necessary.

~~~
guruparan18
Copy the URL, Google it, and click the link, it should open full article (see
previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9531941)
or read this: [https://umur.io/paywall-bypass-bookmarklet-come-from-
google/](https://umur.io/paywall-bypass-bookmarklet-come-from-google/)).

* Edit: Removed: "go to Google, Search", added: Google it. _Aside: stupid me_.

~~~
achow
For those who are interested in knowing about the working behind this Life Pro
Tip - It works because of Google's 'First click free' arrangement with the
newspapers.

 _First click free: We 've worked with subscription-based news services to
arrange that the very first article seen by a Google News user (identifiable
by referrer) doesn't require a subscription. Although this first article can
be seen without subscribing, any further clicks on the article page will
prompt the user to log-in or subscribe to the news site._

[https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543](https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543)

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jiraaya
I am not sure how much of actual "work" is going to vanish. My premise is that
"work" is going to be relocated but not eliminated. Moving to cloud is not as
easy as drag and drop. Netflix had to do plenty of re-work (and write a bunch
of very cool tools along the way) to achieve it.

The problem comes from legacy systems. They are very real and very slow
moving. People do not want to alter them as that may involve re-tooling their
entire ecosystem. If they do want to migrate to cloud (eventually), they would
have to deal with all the additional complexity of a hybrid cloud eco-system.

Where cloud is a huge win though is lowering the entry barrier for start-ups.
More start-ups are getting more things done at lesser cost and lesser time
than ever before. These are exciting times for innovation.

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codeonfire
Web-based services make it difficult to bilk customers because there is no way
to increase costs. The rate is fixed ahead of time. The service either works
or it doesn't. There is no possibility of hardware problems, software rework,
configuration issues, overbilling, etc. There are no contract negotiation or
lowball bidding games (and subsequent cost overruns) either because services
are pay as you go. Outsourcers will have to either invent new corporate IT
products that are not provided as services yet or build competing services.

~~~
drcross
Network Engineers will rejoice at this. As the network becomes more depended
upon QOS manipulation and failover link management comes to the fore.

~~~
abrookewood
Sorry, but I disagree - and my background is in networking. With AWS or Azure,
no one cares about the network or servers. The only thing required is a decent
link connecting you to the cloud and you are done. No one is going to hire
network engineers to manage such a reduced portfolio.

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toomuchtodo
What office size? 10-50 people on a managed switch? Sure. Once you start
talking larger corporate footprints, you have an entire local network to
manage, gear throughout a campus, SLAs to meet for local users.

Reduced portfolio. Hah!

~~~
abrookewood
Yeah, I was talking about small to medium sized offices. For large
deployments, you'll still need network admins etc, but my point was simply
that the general need for these skills is in decline.

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honest_joe
They do not change the direction they simply kill the jobs and have been doing
this for decades (disclaimer i am not an american nor wester european and am
in similar position of being a cheap eastern european workforce)

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known
TCS/Wipro/Infosys are not selling software; They're selling 'software
engineers' to US/UK clients;

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yask123
To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In :\

~~~
srikz
Do a google search of the tile and then click on that link to access the full
article.

Edit: Just saw that guruparan18 has already posted the solution

