CA unifies Dubai Holding's IT infrastructure

.: Acorn Networks :. In today's Middle East business community too many organisations are suffering from 'technology regression' over complex technology systems are actually making our business life harder, not easier, to work productively.
CA, one of the world's largest IT management software companies, today announced the successful implementation of its Unicenter range of products for Dubai Holding, across the Group.
The CA products installed, manage the entire network, servers and databases, and include the Unicenter service desk, desktop management tools as well as the Unicenter network and system management products.
Dubai Holding was created to consolidate the various large scale infrastructure and investment projects that contribute towards Dubai's economic, social and industrial developments, including Technology, Communication, Energy, Health and Education, Tourism, Real Estate, Finance, Hospitality, Biotechnology and Industrial manufacturing sectors.
CA's portfolio of enterprise IT management solutions has helped unify and simplify the varied IT infrastructure of Dubai Holding, which recently consolidated its IT departments from over 30 geographically dispersed end-user communities under one roof, known as the Chief Information Office (CIO).
One of the primary challenges faced by Dubai Holding was the need to deliver quick solutions and rapid response time for internal IT problems, while simultaneously providing seamless IT support throughout the organisation. Reducing costs with increased efficiency in IT deliverables was also among its priority.
CA's Unicenter Service Desk addressed these challenges by offering immediate solutions to common issues in significantly shortened response times. IT Service Desk, the system which replaced the old help desk, introduced incident management tools which can categorise and prioritise incidents, as well as manage all its end user IT issues centrally. Unicenter tools further assisted Dubai Holding realise its return on investment by aligning its IT operations into a well managed system. A drastic improvement in the incident resolution rates means that Dubai Holding can offer both its end users and customers a superior level of service.
CA's extensive post sales support, local technical staff as well as the ability to amalgamate solutions onto a single operating platform, was one of the main criteria in gaining the confidence and the business of the region's leading corporation. CA's desk top management tools were integrated into the IT Service desk solutions and provided software delivery, asset management and remote control facilities. With these technical enhancements Dubai Holding was able to incorporate a complete end user management solution.

Betwixt and between ODF, OO-XML, and Google, Corel discusses Wordperfect roadmap

.: Acorn Networks :. Until very recently, if you or your company wanted to buy a "productivity suite" — a package of software that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, Powerpoint-like presentations, and a few other helpful utilities — there were relatively few choices and none of them played well together. In other words, while you may have been able to open documents that were saved in one suite using another suite, that "interoperability" was never quite perfect. Not only that, the vendors who made these suites have had a limited amount of incentive to fix the problem. When you're a vendor, interoperability is often a bad thing. It gives end users what the deserve. The power to switch.
If you're a vendor and you can addict your customers to your proprietary (vendor-specific) formats, that's a good thing. The more documents your customers create in with your suite of software, the more addicted to that software your customers will become — eventually relying on it to the exclusion of everything else to create, open, save, or edit their documents.
But then, in 2005, if you were a user of such suites, the productivity suite interoperability landscape took a turn for the better when a group of vendors including IBM and Sun got together to create a common way for saving and retrieving documents known as the OpenDocument Format or ODF. Although ODF has risen in status to an international standard, having recently been ratified by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), there is one small wrinkle: Microsoft, the maker of the most popular suite — Microsoft Office — has so far shown limited interes in getting its productivity suite to work with ODF. Instead (still more good news for end users), in the name of the same interoperability that ODF was created for, Microsoft has released a different "open" format known as the Office Open XML format or OO-XML and it too is headed to the ISO for ratification (although no one can say for sure whether or not it will get it). Say what you will about Microsoft coming out with an additional standard rather than just supporting ODF, the bottom line is that the world is better off with open formats rather than the closed ones that existed just a year or two ago.

EMPLOYMENT LAW: IT support specialists would be non-exempt

.: Acorn Networks :. In response to an employer that was in the process of creating a new IT Support Specialist position, the Wage & Hour Administrator issued an opinion letter advising that the new position, as described, would not qualify for the administrative or computer employee exemption to the Fair Labor Standards Act under the revised white-collar exemption rules (W & H Opinion Letter No 2538 (FLSA2006-42)).
The employer plans to have shifts of IT Support Specialists working or on-call 24 hours a day. According to the job description provided to the agency, the IT Support Specialist (renamed from Help Desk Support Specialist) would be responsible for the diagnosis of computer-related problems as requested by employees, physicians, and contractors. The IT Support Specialist conducts problem analysis and research, troubleshoots, and resolves complex problems either in person or by using remote software. The position requires a high school diploma or GED, although an associate degree is preferred.
Administrative exemption. The Wage and Hour Administrator concluded, based on the information provided by the employer, that the IT Support Specialist position did not qualify for the administrative exemption under Section 13(a)(1) of the FLSA. Although minor aspects of the work reportedly include participating in the design of client configurations and analyzing and selecting new technology, the tasks performed and the decisions made by an IT Support Specialist does not demonstrate that their primary duty includes the exercise of discretion and independent judgment with respect to matters of significance to management or general business operations of the employer. To qualify for the administrative exemption, however, such a showing is necessary.
"The primary duty of the IT Support Specialist you describe consists of installing, configuring, testing, and troubleshooting computer applications, networks, and hardware. Maintaining a computer system and testing by various systematic routines to see that a particular piece of computer equipment or computer application is working properly according to the specifications designed by others are examples of work that lacks the requisite exercise of discretion and independent judgment within the meaning of the administrative exemption," the Wage and Hour Administrator wrote. "Employees performing such activities are using skills and procedures or techniques acquired by special training or experience. Their duties do not involve, with respect to matters of significance, the comparison and the evaluation of possible courses of conduct, and acting or making a decision after the various possibilities have been considered as required by [the white-collar exemption rules]."
Computer employee exemption. The Wage and Hour Administrator also concluded that the primary duty of the IT Support Specialist does not consist of duties similar to those discussed in the computer employee exemption regulations, and as such, the position does not qualify for the computer professional exemption under FLSA sections 13(a)(1) and 13(a)(17).
The white-collar exemption rules list employees who qualify for this exemption as including computer systems analysts, computer programmers, software engineers, and other similarly skilled workers in the computer field. As explained in the preamble to the final rule, such job titles alone, however, are not the determining factor for exemption. An exempt computer employee's primary duty must consist of those duties discussed in 29 C.F.R. 541.400(b). These duties include:
the "application of systems analysis techniques and procedures, including consulting with users, to determine hardware, software or system functional specifications";
"[t]he design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing or modification of computer systems or programs, including prototypes, based on and related to user or system design specifications";
"[t]he design, documentation, testing, creation or modification of computer programs related to machine operating systems"; or
"[a] combination of these duties, the performance of which requires the same level of skills."
The primary duty of the IT Support Specialist position as described, however, involved none of these roles. Thus, the computer exemption was inapplicable. The position, as delineated, would be nonexempt, the Wage and Hour Administrator advised.

Nationwide SIP Network

.: Acorn Networks :. AccessLine Communications completed a multi-year migration of its telecommunications network to the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard. Through leveraging its highly flexible SBC technology and sophisticated internal signaling, AccessLine can normalize complex SIP interoperation nuances and offer unified access to multiple VoIP domains via a single interconnection with AccessLine. The company is one of the first nationwide VoIP application service providers to invest in – and complete – nationwide network support for the SIP standard.
SIP is an open application-layer signaling control standard for establishing and terminating calls over a VoIP network. It delivers more architectural freedom to VoIP developers, allowing them to more easily and quickly develop network modifications for specific customers or specific applications.
“Each network service provider presents a different combination and permutation of the myriad options and capabilities that can be supported over a SIP interface,” said Jerry Knight, Chief Technology Officer for AccessLine. “AccessLine's customers can reap all the benefits in reach, availability, features and cost of multiple carrier interconnections via a single interconnection with AccessLine. This can save the customer years in time to market and technical effort that can be re-deployed on other more valuable initiatives. This is of particular importance to customers with large call volumes, where redundancy and availability are primary concerns.”
In addition to the unique “normalization function” that is inherent to AccessLine's SIP Network, AccessLine is able to deploy a much larger number of SBCs (Session Border Controllers) at a much lower cost than most other carriers. This simultaneously gives AccessLine both a cost and quality advantage. For customers of AccessLine’s hosted SmartVoice Service for business, this means that the benefits of advanced business telephone service are delivered at a fraction of the cost of competing services. AccessLine’s investment in its network migration to SIP means increased call quality, high availability and improved traffic efficiency.

BT Global outsources network support to Alcatel-Lucent for $US350m

.: Acorn Networks :. Just days after its formation Alcatel-Lucent has announced its first major contract: a $US350 million contract to take over responsibility for the maintenance of BT Global Services' global network for the next eight years.
Alcatel-Lucent’s Services will assume responsibility for the majority of BT Global Services’ equipment maintenance and spares management contracts. The contract covers first line maintenance, second, third and fourth line support. BT say it expects to derive cost savings in excess of $US100 million over the lifetime of the contract.
“By moving to a single-point-of-contact supplier, we will be able to benefit from having one primary interface for support services rather than having to manage a large number of service vendors, while service level agreements will remain at the current high level, or be improved where needed," said Roel Louwhoff, president of customer service and network operation in BT Global Services.

One-click BackUp for WinRAR Makes Daily Backups Easy

.: Acorn Networks :. Acritum Software has released One-click BackUp for WinRAR 2.16, a handy file backup utility for Windows. The product is available as freeware for home users and non-commercial organizations. Professional version with network support is available for corporate and advanced users at a small price.
It's important to have backup copies of all important documents, so you can restore your information if accidentally erase it, or if you have a hardware malfunction or virus attack. Because creating daily backups is boring, most people don't do it. One-click BackUp makes your life safer by automatically doing your backups, without fail.
The program acts as an easy-to-use backup shell for WinRAR archiver thus providing higher compression and safety of your documents in comparison with ordinary ZIP backups. OCB supports three backup formats - RAR, ZIP and self extracting EXE container.
OCB gives you full access to all key features of WinRAR - compression levels, volumes, password protection, recovery record, etc. You can easily run backup tasks manually or using the backup scheduler or the shell notifier which can run a backup process when the content of a certain folder changes. OCB can hide itself and create backup archives with a low process priority to let you proceed with your daily work without any inconvenience.
Having created an archive, OCB can store it to a local or removable drive, copy it to a network folder, write it to a CD/DVD disc, upload it to a FTP server or send it to your e-mail. You don't have to remember about your backups until you finally need them. Just set the number of backup copies you want to have and OCB will keep only recent archives and automatically delete old redundant ones. This is quite a useful feature when backing up to FTP servers where the available space it often limited. When backing up to CD/DVD discs, OCB can automatically erase them when there isn't enough room to write a new archive. The minimum of manual work - this is the main conception of One-click BackUp.
System administrators will also enjoy such advanced features as command line support, remote control of backup processes via Internet or LAN, error notification to e-mail and anti-hooligan protection.

The Journal Newspapers Selects Red Level Networks

.: Acorn Networks :. LIVONIA — The Journal Newspapers, which publishes eight weekly newspapers covering communities in western Wayne County, Mich., has selected Red Level Networks (Red Level) to maintain and support the company’s information technology (IT) infrastructure. Red Level is a full service IT solutions company that designs, installs and provides ongoing network support for nearly 200 small and medium-sized businesses across Southeast Michigan.
“Based off strong referrals we chose to partner with Red Level, as handling our own IT needs in-house became more and more time consuming,” said Douglas Willet, general manager of The Journal Newspapers. “Our organization is continuously on tight deadlines, and Red Level’s responsiveness, ability to quickly step in and understand our technology is essential for our business.”
Servicing 40 desktops and four servers, Red Level will provide IT and professional services to The Journal Newspapers, including support for email, security, remote access and Intranet systems. Partnering with Red Level to handle important technology issues will improve efficiencies and allow more time for The Journal Newspapers management staff to focus elsewhere throughout the organization.
“As companies continue to expand, outsourcing their IT management is very often the most viable, cost effective solution,” said David King, president of Red Level Networks. “By working with us, The Journal Newspapers will now be able to focus completely on growing their business and less time looking after their IT investments.”
Emerging and rapidly growing businesses form the core of Red Level Networks’ client community. In 2005, the company posted corporate revenue of just over $1 million, a 225-percent increase over 2004 sales, and its customer base grew 110 percent.

Gizmo Partners with AAPT to Smooth the Way for WiFi Adoption in Australia

.: Acorn Networks :. Sydney, NSW – 05 December, 2006 – Gizmo, the support service designed to help Australians get the most out of their computer and digital lifestyle gadgets, today announced a service partnership with AAPT to provide in-home tech support for AAPT’s new WiFi modem customers. The partnership comes on the heels of Gizmo’s expansion from Sydney into Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra metropolitan areas as the company brings home tech support services to more people across the nation.
Gizmo, the support service designed to help Australians get the most out of their computer and digital lifestyle gadgets, today announced a service partnership with AAPT to provide in-home tech support for AAPT’s new WiFi modem customers. The partnership comes on the heels of Gizmo’s expansion from Sydney into Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra metropolitan areas as the company brings home tech support services to more people across the nation.
Gizmo will be offering a specialised home network support bundle to complement the rollout of AAPT’s new WiFi service, due for launch in early December. Gizmo’s support bundle will include help with setting up AAPT’s WiFi modem and connecting it to home peripherals; ensuring that the new home network is secure and protected; and also includes basic hints and tips on how to maximise the performance of the new set-up.

Wireless networks give people the freedom to share music, files and printers as well as connect to the internet from anywhere in the home.

"Through our partnership with AAPT, Gizmo is helping Australians get the most out of their new digital lifestyle investments," said Brett Chenoweth, Gizmo’s CEO. "As more people adopt services like AAPT’s WiFi modem offer, Gizmo will be on hand to ensure it runs smoothly, securely and trouble-free."

Greg Armstrong, Head of Marketing, Consumer and Small Enterprise, AAPT said, "The AAPT home WiFi modem offer presents great value for those consumers who are looking for a cost effective wireless network solution for the home. We understand that customers want to get the most out of WiFi services by being able to link up more than one PC or even how they can link WiFi to other home products such as house alarms, stereo systems, air conditioners etc. The addition of Gizmo’s installation services makes the digital wireless home a lot more achievable."
The AAPT and Gizmo WiFi network bundle will be available for $199, which includes the AAPT WiFi modem and a home visit to set-up the new WiFi home network.

Gizmo also has a wide list of additional service packages designed specifically to address the diverse needs of home technology and digital devices. Home service visits are priced at a flat rate1 and range from $120 to $240 depending on the service required while over the phone service is a flat $60 (support that requires less than ten minutes costs only $20). Additionally, Gizmo offers a ‘no fix, no fee’ guarantee2.

Siemens’ New OpenStage™ Family of SIP Phones Provide Personal Fixed Mobile Convenience with Style

.: Acorn Networks :. BOCA RATON, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Siemens Communications, Inc., today announced OpenStage™, a new line of stylish IP telephones that bring an open communications hardware platform to the desktop for the first time. With four different models ranging from basic to advanced, OpenStage phones feature a revolutionary new design that combines ease-of-use with PC functionality – the biggest change in the telephone interface since the pushbutton phone replaced the rotary dialer. In addition, OpenStage phones utilize Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to integrate wired, wireless and IP communications to invoke new conferencing and call features such as “push to conference,” desktop call management, “presence” based calling, and more. The phones also support compatible third-party applications through standards-based technology such as Java, HTML, WML and XML so that they can become a key interface for everyday enterprise business applications.
OpenStage introduces a touch sensitive wheel, called TouchGuide™ that allows easy access to the menu-driven user interface. The TouchSlider™ controls the volume of the handset, ringer and speaker phone, and there are touch sensitive pre-set and programmable keys that provide easy access to frequently used applications and features, such as address books, voicemail, conferencing, and speed dial. OpenStage also lets you dial using hands-free voice commands or a conventional keypad. It also features a high-quality speaker phone that has been specially designed for conference calls, and can operate multiple connections from the same desktop.
“End-users in business environments are faced with an ever-increasing variety of communications capabilities, devices, interfaces and modes. Efforts to streamline and integrate these capabilities, and to make the most of the latest in navigation techniques, are welcome and will get the attention of buyers,” said Jerry Caron, Vice President, Current Analysis. “Innovative systems, such as the Siemens Enterprise Communications Open Stage portfolio, make access to sophisticated capabilities easier and more intuitive, thus inherently raising the relevance of the capabilities themselves.”
Built-in Bluetooth support also lets you use a Bluetooth headset with the OpenStage deskphone for hands-free operation. A V.Card exchange even allows you to transfer contacts between compatible mobile phones and the desk phone. A USB port is available to backup data, such as personal contacts, as well as to connect to a wireless LAN using a WLAN dongle. With network support, you can readily access a corporate phone directory using an LDAP client, or gain public phone directory access using XML to look up new contacts.
“OpenStage is the missing link that integrates cellular, the Internet and the wired desktop,” said Thomas Zimmermann, Chief Operating Officer of Siemens Enterprise Communications. “We designed OpenStage to deliver mobile convenience in a fixed device, providing instant access that is always available and easy to drive. And this line of IP telephones offer a new, rich communications experience that combines style elements with the convenience of a mobile phone.”
OpenStage is designed to help organizations improve productivity and streamline workflow by integrating system-wide communications into the most-used office device, the telephone handset. Since it is an open application platform, OpenStage gives IS departments and third party developers more flexibility to write and deploy a wide range of value-added applications that can make the phone a key interface for enterprise applications and that can speed communications and workflow.
For example, Java applications that run on a PC, mobile phone, or PDA can now be readily ported to run on the OpenStage phone. Using HTML, the phones can be used as an interface for hosted applications, such as timesheets, calendars, or public phone books. WML support makes it compatible with applications developed for mobile phones, such as access to traffic news. Support for XML also makes it easy to customize OpenStage for any number of users, such as interfaces for building control systems, responses to incoming calls or to create "tell me when" applications that monitor for specific conditions. OpenStage is part of LifeWorks, Siemens’ vision for open communications and seamless collaboration across multiple protocols, networks, and devices.
OpenStage phones will retail starting at $295. They will be offered through Siemens Alliance partners.

Loves Linux, Runs Windows

.: Acorn Networks :. PARIS -- European governments have long complained about their dependence on Microsoft's software, but their rhetoric has not turned into a mass migration away from Windows.
During the past few years, Europe's elected officials have made a lot of noise about ambitious projects to switch to open source software, including big migrations of government PCs in France, Germany, Spain and Norway.
These plans are often heralded as major inroads against Microsoft's Windows hegemony in the old country -- where Microsoft has been fined close to $1 billion in antitrust violations by the European Commission.
Yet the actual migrations have been negligible. More than 95 percent of all PCs used by European government workers still run on Windows, according to the market research firm IDC.
"No one has come out and said 'we are migrating every desktop or laptop on Linux,'" said IDC analyst Massimiliano Claps.
In Norway, a project known as eNorway 2009 was begun in 2005 to convert Norway's public sector to open source software.
The goal was for all government institutions to begin replacing Windows with non-proprietary, open source software by the end of this year, but the project has stalled, with few if any Linux PC installations, according to Geir Nøklebye, an IT consultant and open source activist.
Even the most ambitious open source initiative in Europe to date -- a massive project begun several years ago by the local government in the Extremadura region of Spain -- has seen only mixed success.
The project has managed to convert more than 75,000 PCs to run on Linux, but the migration has not been total. Even some of the computers in the project's administrative office still run Windows, one anonymous employee told Wired News.
The Extremadura government has saved 30 million euro in licensing fees by adopting gnuLinEx for an investment of 125,000 euro, according to local officials.
"Extremadura's project is the biggest and the most ambitious in Europe because of the political clout behind it," said Luis Millán Vazquez de Miguel, regional minister of infrastructures and technological development for Junta Extremadura, in an e-mail.
Despite the massive shift, compatibility issues necessitate the use of Windows PCs for some applications, such as for CAD drawing or for graphics design programs, said project employees contacted by Wired News.
It's the same story across Europe. Switching to open source can cause compatibility issues with Microsoft's file formats, which are proprietary -- and still used by the vast majority of other computer users. There can be conflicts with MS Exchange servers, commonly used for e-mail and calendaring. And there's the problem of educating government IT departments about the ways of Linux.
Elected officials might make public proclamations about how their government's PCs will no longer be captive to Microsoft's oppression, but getting the IT department to carry out the noble plan and to do the necessary grunt work is far from easy.
"If the technicians say 'no,' it's not going to happen," Nøklebye said.
Still, Europe's elected officials continue to drive toward open source. In the next few months, lawmakers in France's National Assembly will begin to use PCs equipped with Linux, Sun's OpenOffice software and the Firefox browser.
Benoît Sibaud, the president of April, a French nonprofit free software organization, said the French government's push away from Microsoft platforms is largely driven by concerns about industrial espionage and security in "the economic war between Europe and the United States."
France's police and tax departments are two branches of the public sector that have sought to adopt open source platforms. But in the case of the Gendarmes, for example, the PCs made available to its 100,000-member police force run almost exclusively on Windows, a spokeswoman said.
Still, the Gendarmes unit plans to equip 5,000 of its PCs with Linux next year under a pilot project, with plans for full integration of the operating system by 2010. The French police unit has also shifted its users to OpenOffice and Firefox while dumping Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer. Many of its servers run on Linux-based platforms.
A Gendarme contacted by Wired News who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that while he was optimistic about the prospects of the Linux operating system and noted how his unit had a capable IT support staff, he was not too happy with OpenOffice. He said he missed MS Office, even though it is designed by a company run by people he considers to be "thieves."
"(OpenOffice) is complicated. It is atrocious," the Gendarme said. "We save money but the advantages of its use are not terribly clear."
Ironically, the French Gendarmes will probably still have to pay a U.S. company licensing fees for the Linux distribution it uses on its PCs.

Outsourcing's Next Phase has Begun

.: Acorn Networks :. "Outsourcing in India has reached a near term peak and meaningful expansion from this point forward will result in higher costs and lower quality delivery." Business Leaders in Asia have been saying this to each other for months now. Today, we are seeing deliberate action to move capacity from India to next step destinations like Philippines, China and Vietnam.
Even major business publications have picked up on the evolving situation. Both Forbes (India: Good Help is Hard to Find) and BusinessWeek (India's IT Challenge) recently published feature articles that directly address the growing problems in India and the viability of the next step destination countries.
Looking at current events in Philippines, we can get a better idea what is going on. Sykes, a large US-based contact center and IT support organization, has operations in both India and Philippines. The company said it would shift much of its Indian capacity to Philippines where it already has 7000 employees. "We moved calls to other facilities in Asia to get a higher rate of return," was the official statement from Dan Hernandez, Sykes's vice-president for global strategies. But knowledgeable observers in the region say that the rate of return differential must be large for a company of Sykes' size and prominence to forgo India after already putting capacity in place.
Ambergris Solutions is another large contact center organization with operations in Philippines. The company just received a $43.5M investment through Telus International, a Canadian-based global IT Solutions provider. Jim Evans, who played the key local role in coordinating the deal, says his company wanted a "strategic investment" in the outsourcing industry in Asia and Philippines offered the best long-term opportunity given all the options including India.
As Asia Pacific VP for global B2B services provider GXS, Victor Lee oversees the professional & customer services operations in the region. His company made the decision to direct functions with a strong customer component to Philippines because of better economics and results there. His company's analysis also indicated that costs were increasing disproportionately in India unlike Philippines. As well, Victor feels that "having product development in India and professional & customer services in Philippines reduces risks."
More outspoken than most, Rick McGonegal is clear that India will not be part of his company's plans for the foreseeable future. He is the Managing Director of RCG Information Technology, another good-sized IT solutions provider. The company already has a strong offshore presence in Philippines and has assessed the Asia Pacific region for future expansion. India, he feels, is already too crowded with numerous companies all scrambling to hire from each other. The result is destructively high staff turnover rates, mounting salary costs and poorer English communications skills compared to that which is available in Philippines. He also cited overstretched infrastructure in India as a further reason RCG would not consider this destination at present. According to Rick, his company has its "radar set on Vietnam and China" should their current best option of Philippines give way.
Others that appear to be moving work to Philippines include: Hewitt, which has just started hiring staff for its newly commissioned BPO facility, and HSBC, the global banking organization, which got their BPO underway a few months ago. I am currently meeting with numerous early stage entrants to Philippines - more than at anytime during the past 3 years. As another anecdote, I spoke recently to the Texas-based Global Recruitment Manager of a multinational technology company who needed help attracting Indians living in the US and Canada to jobs back in India. This is no surprise since there is strong demand for returnee management talent. Except that this fellow was not looking for managers, he was looking for individual contributors with 3 years of Java/C++ experience - a core skill that was once available in seemingly infinite quantities. He described, with great exasperation, the challenges his company faced hiring such people within India these days.
Long Live the King!
No one is saying that the King of Outsourcing will lose its dominance or its long-term attractiveness as an outsourcing destination. India created the offshore outsourcing model and it will continue driving the industry forward because of its huge size and the remarkable competence of its managers.
If India does experience slower growth because of constrained resources in the near term, it is only because of its tremendous success over the past few years. India's recent hiring growth has been roughly double that of the crazy dotcom boom times in North America. So, current alleged constraints are not indicative of weakness but of great success.
And besides, rising costs may be a big deal to business leaders who have to somehow budget for them. But for individual workers, who see their paychecks rise by 30% from a well timed job change, "rising costs" probably don't warrant the same degree of concern.
If countries like Philippines and Vietnam are better options today, it is only because they have been less successful at developing and attracting quality outsourcing employers in the past. The pioneering accomplishments made by India have now opened the door for these countries to receive their share of the blessings. And as for India, we can be sure they will soon be back stronger than ever.