Daily Archives: November 15, 2011

Indian Outsourcing Model ‘Over,’ Says HCL Exec

Offshore outsourcing, where U.S. companies farm out tech work to low-cost countries like India, will wane as routine data center functions become automated and businesses start to employ IT for more strategic purposes–like building new sales channels–and seek service providers that can help them along that path, according to a senior industry exec.

"You can look at the early signs that the Indian IT model is over," said Krishnan Chatterjee, head of global strategy and marketing at HCL Technologies, during an interview last week. "The question that customers are now asking is, ‘Are you willing to blend multiple services into an integrated offering, so we can talk as business partners, rather than you giving me 10 bodies who will churn out x lines of code at the cheapest rate."

What’s driving the change is that new technologies like virtualization, cloud computing, and smart analytics are automating many routine IT tasks–such as network provisioning and monitoring–that have often been offshored. That means companies can use more of their technology budgets for strategic projects that can drive growth through new products and services. They need IT service providers who can keep up.

A deal that HCL announced last week illustrates the type of higher level engagements the company is seeking. U.S.-based healthcare payer United Health Group said it would use proprietary software tools developed by HCL to support its adoption of new disease classification codes, known as ICD-10, which go into effect in 2013.

Source: http://informationweek.com/news/services/outsourcing/231902873

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Amazon Hoping Software Lights a Fire Under Tablet

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The war to build the best tablet is shifting to software.

In the year-and-a-half since Apple Inc. released the market-leading iPad, other companies have tried to one-up the technology giant by going smaller, lighter and cheaper. Now, as the number of tablet entrants picks up, the competition is expanding to what the device can do and not just what it looks like.

On Monday, Amazon.com Inc. began shipping its new Kindle Fire, a $199 tablet packed with custom software that the Seattle company hopes will distinguish its device. The apps include a tailored version of the Pulse news-reader, versions of its Audible audio-book app and IMDb movie database, and its own Amazon shopping store, according to the company.

Akshay Kothari, co-founder of Pulse, said Amazon approached the Silicon Valley start-up about six months ago to build something that couldn’t be easily replicated on other devices. Pulse is also available on Barnes & Noble Inc.’s Nook as well as the iPad.

But the version for the Kindle Fire will have features not available for other devices. For example, stories breaking in Pulse will appear in an area of the Fire home screen where users scroll through books and other content, without requiring people to launch the app. Consumers will also be able to send stories they read on Pulse to other Kindle apps, such as apps for saving content, he said.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204323904577037963397348788.html

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Apple’s iTunes Match now available; feature costs $24.99 a year

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After delays, Apple’s iTunes Match is now live.

For $24.99 a year, users can add music not purchased from iTunes — such as songs imported from a CD or downloaded from other sources — to his or her iCloud music collection. Music can then be played on any iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac or PC "whenever you want and wherever you are, without syncing," Apple said.

Here’s the company’s description of how it works:

"ITunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 20 million songs in the iTunes Store, chances are, your music is already in iCloud. And for the few songs that aren’t, iTunes has to upload only what it can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it to any of your devices. Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality."

As we reported previously, matching a user’s iTunes library in the cloud takes just minutes, Apple says. By contrast, Google’s Music Beta and Amazon’s Cloud Player services require users to upload song files to "cloud lockers" themselves and offer no matching options.

In order to pull all this off, Apple reached large contracts with major record labels, agreeing to give them a share of the revenue from iTunes Match subscriptions. If iTunes Match users let their subscriptions run out and don’t pay to re-up, their iCloud libraries would revert to just the songs they’ve bought from iTunes.

Source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/11/apples-itunes-match-now-available-feature-costs-2499-a-year.html

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