Lotus Notes, Domino & Outsourcing

Gartner released its brief IT Outsourcing to India - Analysis of Cities (PDF File) this week analyzing the different Indian cities on their potential to emerge as leaders in the Offshore Outsourcing market.

The presentation starts with a question that summarizes how most people view the IT Outsourcing trend to India .. “Isn’t all of India like Bangalore?” and goes onto classify cities into Tiers, outline factors for evaluation (including Infrastructure, Skills Availability, Skills Retention, Access, Political Support, an “Expatriate Index” and Cost of Living) and a rating of the cities on these factors.

The report ranks Chennai very high - E (Excellent) or VG (Very Good) on all factors but for Infrastructure for which Chennai gets a G (Good) and improving. Chennai is obviously one of the best bets for companies looking at offshore operations - either captive or outsourced.

We have been advising clients who look at the offshore decision helping them through the tasks involved in setting up operations in India, and we do notice Chennai becoming very attractive for people considering offshore.

Good going Chennai.

The launch of Blackberry devices and service by Airtel pushes the envelop of what is feasible to do while mobile in India. Ofcourse, Blackberry devices support secure access to Domino data, and Domino with Blackberry is one of the hottest emerging niches. We are gearing ourselves up for action both in the local Indian market and in the offshore markets of US by picking up skills on Blackberry and using Blackberry to access Lotus Domino data.

The latest print edition of Dataquest has a special coverage of Chennai. While Bangalore and Hyderabad have been hogging all the limelight around offshore outsourcing and software services in the media, good ol’ Chennai has been slowly and steadily chugging towards a fairly enviable software services industry. We have always known it in running our Lotus Notes Outsourcing business, and it is good to see the trade media recognizing it. Some highlights from the article:

• Chennai (Tamil Nadu) is the third largest recipient of FDI into India
• The state has 25 universities, and 250 engineering colleges producing over 70,000 engineering graduates of whom 35,000 are from IT, CS and related backgrounds.
• Chennai has upto 50% lower attrition compared to other locations
• Real Estate prices in Chennai are 30 - 40% cheaper than Bangalore
• Chennai has 99.7% power availability, far more than what Bangalore has
• Chennai has excellent connectivity with bandwidth in excess of 13 Tbps+ being the nodal point for interconnect with Singapore and other East Asian countries
• Chennai has good international connections with seamless connection to South East Asia and Europe

The present government and its competent IT secretary, Vivek Harinarain have been slowly working towards selling the state as an investment destination. With wins like Yahoo and HP, and existing operations of CA, Verizon, World Bank, McKinsey and others, Chennai will be a big player in the years to come.

I’ve always been bugged by the number of ads I saw of GoToMyPC. I’m a big fan of VNC and I thought GoToMyPC could be a tricky deal, given that connections are being routed through their server. I realized yesterday that this is a Citrix venture, and that changes my perception big time. Remote access, as enabled by these tools are a big part of what is collapsing distance in the world. Quite often, when I work on offshore Lotus Notes projects, I have clients facing problems with a release that I cannot easily understand. I wish I could be there next to him/her, seeing what he sees on his desktop. Sure, Domino Administrator is way too cool as a remote administration tool, and it collapses distance quite a bit. But the problems are typically what is outside the purview of Domino Administrator. Quite often they are with the desktop, when an application is being installed over a Notes Client. Remote access tools are quite the savior in this aspect. While VNC does great, Citrix would do better, given the way they transparently handle the installation process and given that they just send the updates to the screen and inputs and not the entire images every time. With near T1 speeds becoming common in India, I anticipate a big jump in the kind of things you can do for overseas customers with these enabling services.

This makes me feel that we are only just beginning with this globalization of service delivery thingie!!

- Venki