Offshoring to grow 40% - Gartner

Gartner, in one of it's press releases, states that offshoring is going to grow more than 40% in 2008.

Gartner evaluated 30 countries on following parameters:
1. Language
2. Government support
3. Labour pool
4. Infrastructure
5. Educational system
6. Cost
7. Political and economic environment
8. Cultural compatibility
9. Global and legal maturity
10. Data and intellectual property security and privacy

Gartner’s top 30 locations for offshore services, by region, were:

Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and Uruguay
Asia/Pacific: Australia, China, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Vietnam
Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA): the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Northern Ireland, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey and Ukraine

Their region specific analysis says:

In Asia/Pacific, although positioned as India’s greatest challenger in terms of its potential scale, China fared poorly for language skills. China, India and Singapore all demonstrated strong government support for the promotion of their country as an offshore services location.

The political and economic environment remains a concern for many companies when moving work to offshore locations; in this area Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam all performed weakly.

My take

Good news !!! atleast for an IT professional like me based in India. :)

Gartner also reports that offshoring is going to grow more than 60%. This will require services companies who can cater to non-english client's requirements. This is tricky and will pose challenge to India. My comment can be challenged because, there is quite a lot of work done by Indian MNCs in Europe.

I am not sure if China or Vietnam is going to be a real challenge to India with the such big English speaking population. Added to this, we have around 2 million engineering graduates getting added to the talent pool. Considering that only 20% is employable in IT, we still have enough talent available.

Having said that, the issues that are going to bite us back are:
1. Infrastructure
2. American economy slump
3. Sticking on to different flavors of same old operating model and methodologies
4. Attrition

Bright Future For BPMS

Guest blooger Gib Bassett at EDM Blog writes about Gartner Predictions for 2008.

Gartner recently issued two “Predicts: 2008” reports highlighting their expectations for Enterprise Architecture and the Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) Market. Both recognize noteworthy and highly complementary trends reflecting the value of Enterprise Decision Management (EDM), particularly Business Rules Management Systems (BRMSs) supporting EDM principles.

I do not have the financial muscle to purchase the report. Here are some snippets from Gib's post.

“Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2012, the BPMS technology market will subsume greater than 80% of the pure-play business rule technology sector (for example, stand-alone business rule engines).”[...]

Gartner goes on to make two final points worth mentioning:

“Due to the increasing need to model rules and business processes simultaneously, it is going to be increasingly difficult to maintain separate rules and process repositories.”

And

“Enterprises need to understand the consequences of not managing rules and processes with a shared metamodel, as well as the effects this will have on their ability to create dynamic business models.”

Read more >>

Pouring cold water on SOA ‘reuse’ mantra

Pouring cold water on SOA ‘reuse’ mantra by ZDNet's Joe McKendrick -- Is reuse an idea that’s too good to be true? The idea of "build once, use often" has a lot of appeal for enterprises, and, as discussed many times in this blogspace, the first and foremost return on investment to be gained from SOA. There has been a lot of buzz and money flowing into [...]

This article points to David Chappell's take on service reuse.

Technocrati

Technorati Profile

Google Grows

Google is growing. Recent post in NYTIMES talk about how Google's share in search market grew.

The research firm Hitwise, which measures Web audiences, said that Google accounted for 58.3 percent of all searches in the United States in March of 2006. By November of 2006, Google’s share had grown to 61.8 percent, and by this November, to 65.1 percent. That’s more than triple the share of its nearest rival, Yahoo, and more than nine times that of third place finisher Microsoft.

Microsoft has been trying out and out to kill Google's growth. To an extent where they are paying corporates for using Live Search and trying to raise concerns over Google's acquisition of DoubleClick.

NewYork times article has also mentioned that:

“As long as Google’s competitors are aiming to be like Google or almost as good as Google, Google will continue gaining share,” said Jordan Rohan, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “It has more resources and engineers focused on search. It is an arms race that they’ve won by a landslide.”

Competetion is going to grow, but with speculation about Google's intention to launch Androind powered phones in February can leave competetors way behind.

Year 2007 was about iPhone. Year 2008 will be about Android.

Updated: Here is an article at slashdot.org which portrays Google and OSS as big threats to Microsoft's survival. Linux is increasingly being used and market share is growing. Unless, Microsoft revisits it's pricing and "openness".

Hilarious one on Facebook Beacon

One of the blogs that I read often is Geek And Poke.

Here is a smart and hilarious one by Olive Widder on Facebook Beacon.

I am sure Google Reader's privacy issue is not as bad this. ;)

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

INTEL coined the term Platform as a Service (PaaS) in their post on 9 Nov, 2006. But the applicability was more inclined towards "the idea that a hardware platform can be architected with service-oriented concepts from the very beginning, having built-in service abstractions available at the bare-metal level."
But, salesforce.com has come up with the first (Software) Platform as a Service. They claim to be the first. Check this video.

1. User Interface as a Service
2. Logic as a Service
3. Integration as a Service
4. Database as a Service

Interesting? Read more here