Indian IT Consultancies Struggle Against Technological Obsolescence (economist.com) 64
Few people outside their home country have heard of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies or Tech Mahindra, India's five biggest information technology (IT) consultancies. Yet even when enterprise software to manage marketing, production, inventory and the like comes from Oracle of America or Germany's SAP, it is often the Indian companies that install and maintain software for clients. But for all their tech nous, the Indian giants have also been unable to keep pace with technological change. The Economist (may be paywalled): Corporate software is becoming easier to use, reducing demand for their services. The lucrative legacy business of running mainframes is evaporating. Helping clients shift to the cloud makes money but not nearly as much. Despite some interesting pilot projects -- such as Tech Mahindra's use of artificial intelligence to tell apart 1,645 Indian languages or Infosys's covid-19 contact-tracing in Rhode Island -- the consultancies have not come up with a killer app, let alone powerful platforms like those of America's big tech firms.
Worse still, multinationals are increasingly reluctant to outsource their IT. Rather than hire the consultants, many are creating subsidiaries in India to do the job in-house -- sucking away both custom and workers from the consultancies. Before the pandemic India hosted more than 1,400 of these so-called "captive centres", employing a total of more than 1m people, according to an analysis by the Ken, an Indian news website; around 70% of them were owned by big American firms. Walmart Labs India, owned by the American supermarket chain, is reportedly on course to double its staff numbers to 7,000 in the next year or two. The popularity of such in-house operations has to do with the changing economics of technology. This once required armies of people, so spreading costs among many clients made sense. With falling prices of hardware and software, and more skilled workers around, a captive centre can pay for itself with just 50 employees, says Peter Bendor Samuel of the Everest Group, a research firm.
Worse still, multinationals are increasingly reluctant to outsource their IT. Rather than hire the consultants, many are creating subsidiaries in India to do the job in-house -- sucking away both custom and workers from the consultancies. Before the pandemic India hosted more than 1,400 of these so-called "captive centres", employing a total of more than 1m people, according to an analysis by the Ken, an Indian news website; around 70% of them were owned by big American firms. Walmart Labs India, owned by the American supermarket chain, is reportedly on course to double its staff numbers to 7,000 in the next year or two. The popularity of such in-house operations has to do with the changing economics of technology. This once required armies of people, so spreading costs among many clients made sense. With falling prices of hardware and software, and more skilled workers around, a captive centre can pay for itself with just 50 employees, says Peter Bendor Samuel of the Everest Group, a research firm.
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The future was written a long time ago (Score:3)
"Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script".
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It doesn't but I'm a PHB and I'll just pay for more cloud kit 'cos it's cheap as chips and then beat my in-house IT staff into making it stumble along and achieve results, albeit shoddy and unsupportable all the time ignoring the IT staff's insistence this will bit back in 18 months time!
Before anyone gets excited (Score:3)
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Umm ok... "their own people" meaning? Somebody is getting a job after all?
Re: Before anyone gets excited (Score:5, Informative)
Umm ok... "their own people" meaning?
Clearly, based on context, 'their' means 'the multi-nationals', meaning companies like the example given of Walmart. So instead of hiring a consulting firm and paying about $500/hr for 10 people, while the consultancy firm pays the workers $4/hr, companies like Walmart are hiring the $4/hr workers directly. For clarity, all happening in India.
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Yes, somebody that doesn't live in the U.S. It said so right in TFS, give it a read!
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Getting Easy? (Score:1)
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No need to install anything when everything runs in a web browser
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My shop, we dropped around 75% ( about 15 ) "data developers", they're job was write and code apps just for reporting for the biz people. We switched to using MS PowerBI, we in the ops team and the remaining dev team just feed raw sources of data into a cloud warehouse that the data and devs designed, then hooked up PowerBI. The biz people love PBI, they can write their own reports, work direct with the data and worst/best of all they can feed their beloved Excel sheets direct into PBI and work reports.
Seen
Canada is in India (Score:2)
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, and HCL Technologies or Tech Mahindra are everywhere in Canada IT business.
Re: Canada is in India (Score:4, Insightful)
I worked with Tech Mahindra on site in Bangalore in a train-your-replacements engagement around 13 years ago. I worked with a group of perhaps 8 engineers including two more senior, with previous experience with our company's projects. The others were young, not highly experienced, but competent within expectations for their levels of experience. Another group in this office area had several younger engineers, male and female, and a somewhat older female group leader who seemed to be working well with her group. That broke my preconceived notions in a positive way.
A couple of years ago I had dealings with Infosys and with a specialized unit of HCL. Infosys met all negative stereotypes. By comparison, HCL had a group in Canada with several extraordinarily good engineers with "a very particular set of skills".
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Infosys USP is they can take trash and make them productive through training and management. Infosys recruts from the worst possile engineering colleges and trains the folks vigorously.. Some of these folks turn out to be diamonds in the rough who just ended up at bad colleges as their parents were not rich enough to pay for extra coaching during high school. But most smart kids in India dont end up at Infosys. They go to product companies or startups or go to post grad programs.
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Last 3 projects we engaged with consultancies from India were OK but it was odd. Each time the core devs know their stuff, they make the pitch and get the gig. The core devs do a stunning job and you get a good app. That's when it falls apart, they hand over to frontline support and it all goes to hell! We've have 3am calls for hours with frontline while they try to find the devs to fix minro issues or they haven't got a clue about simple stuff like doing restores or DR tests, patching would be done without
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Disappointment (Score:5, Funny)
They can go up in flames for all I care (Score:2)
They need to stop bombarding innocent people with fake phone calls on how their Internet or telephone services are being disconnected, how they now have to pay for Amazon Prime, how hackers have broken into their computer, and other scams, all in an attempt to sell them help.
I get these calls about every two weeks and my telephone company has got a tracker for this problem with people all over the UK getting these scam calls every single day.
The caller ids are fake and so cannot be blocked by normal telepho
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When the criminals get tech savvy, cops have to get savvier to keep up. Any country has bad apples. The solution is not to destroy the IT industry, the solution is to add resources to investigate and prosecute these cyber criminals. Fact is if these folks were in the UK, the level of tech savviness they have would have got them legit jobs but in India competition is tougher Some just dont want to work hard and try to take the easier way of cybercrime as the cops are way behind on cyber crime. Indian govt ne
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I'm more inclined to believe that they make a killing with those scams, find it acceptable to scam people in wealthy countries or believe it's a fun game, they get away with it easily and also believe they cannot get any IT jobs unless the wealthier countries hire them.
Western citizens then certainly don't need to get more tech literate. That's nonsense. It's like giving in to terrorism, and one doesn't give in to terrorists, criminals, bullies, scammers, stalkers or just plain assholes. They need to be sto
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Ok Princess
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Just in your last response did you argue that people had to become more literate, and now look at yourself! I suggest you grow up and get more literate, princess.
Corporate software is becoming easier to use? (Score:2)
1) it is not
2) these companies are not making it easier, just more expensive
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You think? Salesforce seems to go in with little consulting, and even the legacy glue is not a big job. Do companies still implement SAP/Oracle for new projects? What is the go-to solution for a process change or usability improvement? Companies realize that the schedule and cost of legacy solutions is not useful.
4 out of 5 on my Resume. (Score:1)
I did everything from branch VPN design, ran a cable headend after a buy out, built a data center for the
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I as a american
I'm having a hard time reconciling this lede with much of the rest of your writing.
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Wanna bet? (Score:2)
"Few people outside their home country have heard of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies or Tech Mahindra, India's five biggest information technology (IT) consultancies."
No, many of us in tech are very aware of who these companies are. They've taken a lot of jobs away from friends and former colleagues.
And given that they make their money by hiring people for as little money as possible, it's not much of a surprise that they can't keep up with technological changes.
Re: Wanna bet? (Score:3)
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Re: Wanna bet? (Score:2)
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4$ per hour is 80000$ per year. 6 figures is 100000$. A 20% difference is not bad for a 66% percent cheaper cost of living.
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Ignore the previous comment. Bad math. 4 dollar per hour is 8000 dollar per yr not 80000 though I doubt any competent person gets paid 4$ an hr in India. 4$ an hour may be a starting salary fresh out of college but salaries rise fast in India. Typical coders make 10$+ an hr. Really good coders make 20-25$ an hr. This is in a country where the min wage is 2 dollar an hr.
The best defense is a good offence (Score:4, Funny)
the Indian giants have also been unable to keep pace with technological change
Or social change -- that baseball team needs to rename itself!
Not too surprised (Score:1)
Anecdotal 'evidence' of course, having worked with engineers from the US, Europe, China and India I have noticed that overall, the Indians have the least amount of that engineering spice (no pun intended) which, granted, is hard to define.
It's all good and well knowing facts and procedures and equations and established practices by rote, but engineering is equally about thinking outside the box, curiosity, intuition and a fair bit of creativity. Very few problems can be solved elegantly and quickly by sim
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I have worked with engineers in and from India for many years during my career. These were not traditional IT engineers, but typically engineers working in a niche software field.
These engineers were very talented, skilled engineers.
These engineers were working direct for the India offices set up by US companies. This is the difference. the best engineers are hired direct. Then the Indian outsourcing companies hire the rest, after the best engineers have already found jobs.
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Always interesting to hear someone else's account. As I said above, any personal experience is likely to be anecdotal, if not downright apocryphal. Of little value in the bigger picture, in any event.
Still, skill or talent isn't what I typically found wanting. Hard to define what then though. Not as passionate and tenacious maybe. A greater distance between the project and the personal, and less prepared to deviate from the tried and tested in favour of a better solution or shortcut.
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That would make sense, b'cos if a company was directly hiring its own employees for its offsite office in India, they'd make sure that that person could actually do the job, and not just try and fit somebody within a budget, as the consulting companies do.
Whereas assigning the consulting company the role of hiring the employees working on the project just means that that company will look for someone less specialized, so that they can keep moving them b/w projects. I think that a combination of outsourci
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Hiring and retention is an art which the outsourcers have perfected. Most of the captives are failing at it and reaching out to the outsourcers to staff people into their captive centers or they are throwing so much money that the entire point of offshoring to cut costs is being lost.
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People tend to self sort to similar levels. Smart people go where the smart people are. If you only met mediocre Indian engineers maybe you were working at a mediocre company doing mediocre work . The Americans you were working with were also mediocre.
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For a long time Indian universities taught people the technology, so India had a good supply of people skilled in using a given technology.
British and American universities (and no doubt others) taught people how to think, so those Indians were competing with people capable of learning the technology, but also capable of thinking beyond it.
Sadly American and British universities appear to have abandoned that strength and focus now on reeducation.
their problem is (Score:1)
Their problem is they are not doing the needful.
I Hereby Coin The Term in-Sourcing (Score:1)
In-Sourcing is the shift of corporations from an outsourcing model to an in-house, but still offshore model.
Whereas before, major corporations "outsourced" to service providers who utilized dirt cheap labor from India and its environs to save money. Now the corporations are hiring the dirt cheap labor directly and cutting out the middleman.
Instead of low grade IT workers working for Wipro and being resold to Walmart et al, the low grade IT workers now work for Walmart et al directly, thus saving them a bunc
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This has been done before. I remember a case a few years back when a number of HP employees working on a GE project were unhappy w/ HP, and GE went ahead and hired them as direct employees.
Looks like a combination of outsourcing and offshoring gives poor results. If one has insourced and onshore, one would have the best results, albeit the most expensive. If it's insourced and offshore, the costs will be down, but the quality would be fine, since the people offshore are permanent employees who know the
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Yeah, you may be a little late to the party.
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Yay! (Score:1)
Seriously, YAY! I've been cleaning up the messes left behind by unqualified overseas body-shops for decades.
Technology giveth and technology taketh away ... (Score:3)
Indian colleges were still teaching Fortran and Cobol well into the 80s. My own brother enrolled in a Cobol diploma course in 1985. Just insanely behind times, well after most American and European univs had end of lifed Cobol education. I was laughing at cobol coders back then, I had degrees from "IIT and IISc" and knew things like the C language. But the joke was on me. Then came Y2K, mainframe software without any real people to maintain it. Suddenly there was demand for Cobol programmers and some database administrators and mainframe hackers and India had the supply. And it shipped some 100,000 cobol programmers a year between 1995 and 2004. I think the H1B was reduced to 65K after that and Indian immigration went down to 50K or so per year.
Now the biggest money maker was customization. Every company bought IT software and customized it to its operations. Each time software is upgraded from say PeopleSoft V2 to V3, all users have to migrate all customizations, all reports, validate all ... cash cow for Accenture , TCS , Wipro, HCL, ....
Now the trend is "cut your feet to fit the shoe once, then no more need for custom made shoes" Companies are adapting to standardized practices in onboarding off boarding, payroll, benefits packages, travel reimbursement process etc etc. All problems of data warehousing, compliance with laws and regulations like Sorbanes Oxley, or reporting requirements are all the headaches of the vendor. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel, just follow well established process. Suddenly all those consultants making tons of money by simply upgrading versions and running regression suites, unit test suites, verify the test output etc etc are all redundant.
And Indian colleges still churn of programmers who are suitable for locally hosted stuff like Oracle version whatever, who are clueless in working with totally cloud based software. There is not much of need for them either. Coding is done by expensive well trained modern languages, cloud based full stack coders, mostly US graduates.
So being behind the technology curve giveth and taketh away.
Indian IT workers (Score:3)
I have worked with a lot (many dozens) of Indian contractors, outsourced and onsite.
My invariable opinion has been that about one in ten is pretty good, some even very good indeed. But the rest are terrible. Even actually worse than useless on occasion.
I have tried to work with outsourced developers actually in India. In one instance (possibly several), we were trying to have a meeting, with them connecting remotely. It was terrible. They were very hard to understand at the best of times [most Indians are convinced they speak perfect English, but I beg to differ], but the connections were terrible and the background noise overwhelming (it sounded like they were in a coffeshop with half the population of India yelling outside - and possibly an elephant).
This suggests to me they have a training problem, and also a qualification problem. There are social problems also, with the classic being always wanting to be agreeable, even if they had no idea what was going on, or had no idea of how to solve the problem they were tasked with.
If this is the normal performance of IT folk in India, I'm not surprised they have problems.
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Software that writes software (Score:2)
In the early 90s we were getting close to the point that having software write software could be cost effective. You would need highly paid architects to come up with bulletproof specs and tests and the software could be generated at about half the cost of normal software dev
Than offshoring came along and developing in India was 10x cheaper and automated software development was no longer cost effective
Now salaries in India have risen and costs are only 3X cheaper.
Meanwhile the science of auto generated sof
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You would need highly paid architects to come up with bulletproof specs and tests
Also known as 'programming'.
It didn't get replaced by offshore, outsourced and imported cheap labour, it was never real in the first place.
end users using point and click interfaces to specify specs in natural languages
That's, erm, not natural language. That's clicking on fucking interfaces.
People will go into their chosen field instead of everyone running after the offshoring dollars. Will be a boost to India's development.
That is to be welcomed, although given the raw population in India I think they can do both.
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You confuse requirement analysis and design with programming whereas they are only parts of the entire programming process and most bodies are involved in the coding phase not the req analysis or design phase.
I was keeping it simple but in case it was confusing the natural language refers to BDD - where you can specify outcomes as natural language sentences and the software changes it into acceptance tests.
Large raw population doesnt mean everyone is smart enough to be an Engineer. US has 300 million people
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You confuse requirement analysis and design with programming
No. I've done enough of all three to know that programming is merely a formalisation of requirements.
Skipping the programming by formalising the requirements is.. programming.
Large raw population doesnt mean everyone is smart enough to be an Engineer. US has 300 million people. Only about a million are in Engineering.
So India can have two million engineers and another two million supporting the IT industry. Which was my point.
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Just because India has 4 times the population does not mean it has 4 times the no of people ready to be Engineers. keep in mind India is a much poorer country with a weaker public education system. The 1 million in India who are smart enough to be Engineers are the seed corn of the country. They should be building up the country . Instead they are fixing javascript for shopping portals in the US. its a misallocation of brain power but the solution lies with the problem itself. As Indians earn money in the U
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who are smart enough
Well forgive me for assuming that Indians are as smart as everybody else.
Differentiate between intelligence and education. Intelligent people can become engineers; they just need education. There are enough Indian universities (let alone schools) to educate far more than a million Indians.
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You cant take someone who has a broken primary edication and educate them to an Engineer. Education starts at age 4. No matter how much natural intelligence if you have come up through a broken system you wont be smart enough at age 17 to pick up engineering. Maybe I should have differntiated between natural and expressed intelligence but I think you do get my meaning. People are equally smart everywhere. The same proportion of people everywhere have the natural propensity to be good engineers but not all o
"The cloud" will be the tech sector's apocalypse. (Score:2)
Everything in the hands of two or three hyper-greedy psychopaths who don't care for anything but your money, and I mean "care" in the same way as the mafiosi who are going to break your shins (business) if you don't pay their protection money. Especially when there's no mainframe vendors around anymore to crawl back to.
It is just the hardware equivalent of outsourcing.
Funny though, how it now bites those in the ass, who did the human outsourcing.
Hey, that gives me an idea: Bite "cloud" outsourcing in the as