A couple of evenings ago, during dinner with a visitor from the US - someone I know very well, the issue of outsourcing to India and the problems experienced came up as a natural point of debate.
Background
- A major networks product company has outsourced their product development to an Indian vendor. The vendor has been late in delivering the project to such an extent that the original US company has lost it's competitive advantage in the market and with the downturn it may have also lost the window of opportunity.
We started to discuss the different approaches that are taken and why this has either worked / not worked in this particular case
- Getting a 3rd party to validate work : This is being done by an US company and the process has not been effective : could the main reason be that that this "validation" company does not
a) Understand the onsite-offshore play and is hence stuck in-between with no value add ?
or b) The intermediary is not involved in the product development process and hence is always having to fall back on "process" compliance / status reports to understand viewpoints ?
or c) A combination of the above 2 with a the real issue being that the intermediary is playing a "relay" role only and is not capable / empowered to make decisions ?
- Ensuring that a senior person capable of making decisions is working with the offshore team to validate delivery.
On this point, the discussion moved to the next question ie. "what is the value then of the offshore delivery team ?"
- Ensuring that someone from the offshore team acts on-behalf of the onsite team ?
Apparently, this was tried with very little success and the main reason for this being
a) Tendency of the senior management of the offshore team in taking the status mechanism and obscuring the real status !
b) Mixed messages between the team on ground and the reviewers
c) Incapable team leadership in terms of priority of issues to be addressed / sequencing (always supply driven sub-optimal solutions)
Notice though, that at NO time during the discussions, was there a question on the CAPABILITY of the delivery team ?
In the end, does it mean that we have just incapable project managers / general managers in the system ?
Or, are they supremely capable in "whitewashing projects" ?
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Friday, December 12, 2008
Data access acceleration : HW or SW based GRID ?
For once, I thought I'd blog on a technical subject :-)
The question that has been in my mind is that - which is a better option for large volume data management - is an hardware solution better or a software solution - or even a combined one ?
About 2 months ago, at the Oracle Open World conference, I watched Larry Ellison announce the HP-Oracle DB machine. During the presentation, I was both bemused (with the idea that this was Larry’s / Oracle’s second venture into the hardware territory post NC) and the fact that for Oracle and HP to come up with this meant there was a real issue with the proliferating data.
As most of the readers would be aware, the last few quarters have seen a tremendous number of activities related to Virtualisation, Grid computing, Cloud computing and High volume data management. What are the options?
Hardware Options: Generally handled with Virtualisation and Grid computing effort as is also Custom Built machines (e.g: HP-Oracle DB machine). While it is a clean way to get to an array structure (CPU slices + Storage Array etc), I am not really sure if this is “efficient” – simply because, the core software / application was never written to take advantage of this.
Software Options : For a “pure” software option to work – there has to be two important components; A mechanism for Caching (In memory caches) and a mechanism for load balancing / splitting into parallel processing threads.
In my opinion, there is going to be a push for a combination of the two with distributed service architecture to manage the growing SOA / message structures inherently with a combination of GRID and CACHE (in memory).
I see three major players in the market today with fairly similar / competing offerings;
You can also see similar postings in the cross link at http://calsoftblog.blogspot.com/
The question that has been in my mind is that - which is a better option for large volume data management - is an hardware solution better or a software solution - or even a combined one ?
About 2 months ago, at the Oracle Open World conference, I watched Larry Ellison announce the HP-Oracle DB machine. During the presentation, I was both bemused (with the idea that this was Larry’s / Oracle’s second venture into the hardware territory post NC) and the fact that for Oracle and HP to come up with this meant there was a real issue with the proliferating data.
As most of the readers would be aware, the last few quarters have seen a tremendous number of activities related to Virtualisation, Grid computing, Cloud computing and High volume data management. What are the options?
Hardware Options: Generally handled with Virtualisation and Grid computing effort as is also Custom Built machines (e.g: HP-Oracle DB machine). While it is a clean way to get to an array structure (CPU slices + Storage Array etc), I am not really sure if this is “efficient” – simply because, the core software / application was never written to take advantage of this.
Software Options : For a “pure” software option to work – there has to be two important components; A mechanism for Caching (In memory caches) and a mechanism for load balancing / splitting into parallel processing threads.
In my opinion, there is going to be a push for a combination of the two with distributed service architecture to manage the growing SOA / message structures inherently with a combination of GRID and CACHE (in memory).
I see three major players in the market today with fairly similar / competing offerings;
- Oracle with it’s COHERENCE offering (Object oriented in memory DB cache) which is actually a product / company acquisition – Tangosol.
- Gemstone with it’s GEMFIRE offering (again OODB / in memory DB cache) and
- Gigaspaces with it’s XAP offering
You can also see similar postings in the cross link at http://calsoftblog.blogspot.com/
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Making a shared computer PERSONAL - An experiment in education
Disclosure - this is an overview post, please lookup Sikshana blog for actual details / instances etc.
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As part of the Sikshana process, Subbu (the resident computing / education expert) was posed with a simple question : If we distribute a laptop / class in the rural schools, how do individual students preserve their own environment and work over several days / periods / sessions ?
The problem seems simple - but, this has a major impact on the psyche of the individual kid. Today, if a child is working on a drawing / painting project, there is a good chance that while using the shared computer, another child will over-write / update / change the first child's work.
Even if that happens on a rare occasion, the child is left disillusioned about the whole project.
This is a tremendous problem not just with sharing, but, also with preserving the session as "active" so that there is no loss in time the next instance the child logs onto the system.
Subbu has come up with an ingenious solution (I believe). The idea is to provide a USB chip with enough software to make the chip the default session handler.
Every kid is given a 2 GB chip (Sikshana is in the process of distributing a 1000 of these to kids), which the child owns.
Every time the child accesses the computer, the child inserts his / her own chip and is up and away immediately. Saves time and also the heartbreak of having someone else destroy one's own work.
The question in my mind is : Is this not the same for offices too ? Can we not make this a commercial process ?
--------------------------
As part of the Sikshana process, Subbu (the resident computing / education expert) was posed with a simple question : If we distribute a laptop / class in the rural schools, how do individual students preserve their own environment and work over several days / periods / sessions ?
The problem seems simple - but, this has a major impact on the psyche of the individual kid. Today, if a child is working on a drawing / painting project, there is a good chance that while using the shared computer, another child will over-write / update / change the first child's work.
Even if that happens on a rare occasion, the child is left disillusioned about the whole project.
This is a tremendous problem not just with sharing, but, also with preserving the session as "active" so that there is no loss in time the next instance the child logs onto the system.
Subbu has come up with an ingenious solution (I believe). The idea is to provide a USB chip with enough software to make the chip the default session handler.
Every kid is given a 2 GB chip (Sikshana is in the process of distributing a 1000 of these to kids), which the child owns.
Every time the child accesses the computer, the child inserts his / her own chip and is up and away immediately. Saves time and also the heartbreak of having someone else destroy one's own work.
The question in my mind is : Is this not the same for offices too ? Can we not make this a commercial process ?
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