Tag Archives: operations

IT outsourcing value to grow by 2.1% in 2012: Gartner

Spending on ITO in the Asia/Pacific region will grow 1 percent in US dollars in 2012 and exceed 2.5 percent growth in 2013. With the exception of Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and to a lesser degree, Singapore and Hong Kong, the countries in Asia/Pacific are quite new in terms of outsourcing usage, understanding and sophistication. The growth is being driven by the large inflow of capital into Asia over the past three to five years, leading to the need among global and regional businesses to scale up their operations.

""Today, cloud compute services primarily provide automation of basic functions. As next-generation business applications come to market and existing applications are migrated to use automated operations and monitoring, increased value in terms of service consistency, agility and personnel reduction will be delivered"", said Gregor Petri, research director at Gartner. ""Continued privacy and compliance concerns may however negatively impact growth in some regions, especially if providers are slow in bringing localized solutions to market.""

Data center outsourcing (DCO), a mature segment of the ITO market, represented 34.5 percent of the market in 2011, but growth will decline 1 percent in 2012. ""The data center outsourcing market is at a major tipping point, where various data center processing systems will gradually be replaced by new delivery models through 2016. These new services enable providers to address new categories of clients, extending DCO from traditional large organizations into small or midsize businesses,"" said Bryan Britz, research director at Gartner.

The application outsourcing (AO) segment is expected to reach $40.7 billion, a 2 percent increase from 2011 spending of $39.9 billion. This growth reflects enterprises’ needs to manage extensive legacy application environments and their commercial off-the-shelf packages that run the business.

""Change is afoot in the AO market. The burdens of managing the legacy portfolio, along with the limitations of IT budgets, have shifted the enterprise buyers to be cautious and favor a more evolutionary approach to other application services, such as software as a service (SaaS),"" said Mr. Britz. ""New applications will largely be packaged and/or SaaS-deployed in order to extend and modernize the portfolio in an incremental manner. While custom applications will remain ‘core’ for many organizations, the trend in the next few years to SaaS enablement in the cloud will reflect in the growth of the AO outlook.""

While there will be some impact from the ongoing business slowdown due to sovereign-debt issues in Europe and slowing exports in China, Gartner expects the ITO market in the emerging Asia/Pacific region to represent the highest growth of all regions.

In North America, Gartner expects that buyers will seek to transition more IT work to annuity-managed service relationships for cost take-out and IT costs. This will keep ITO growing through 2016. Enterprises’ reluctance to hire or make large capital purchases, as well as their pursuit of asset-light IT strategies, continues to push clients toward consuming externally provided services.

source:http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-08-07/bangalore/33082277_1_ito-market-bryan-britz-saas

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US tech investors hurt by offshore cash

American tech titans Apple and Microsoft racked up more billions in sales and profits in their latest quarterly filings — thus adding to their offshore treasure trove.

By conservative estimates, Apple has roughly $74 billion parked overseas, while software giant Microsoft has an estimated $50 billion outside the reach of US tax authorities. And eBay had $8 billion of cash on its balance sheet as of last month, with about $7 billion of it residing outside the US.

This money, while being used to fund international operations, is also out of the grasp of shareholders, who could use a larger dividend or stock buyback by the companies with that cash cache.

“Apple has conducted all of its business with the highest of ethical standards, complying with applicable laws and accounting rules,” the company said in a statement about the matter.

Apple and Microsoft are, of course, by no means alone. There are varying estimates of the total amount of the huge sums parked abroad by these and other US multinationals. What everyone agrees on is that the numbers are huge.

A stunning report by the Tax Justice Network estimates that unreported US offshore wealth in tax havens has climbed to as much as $32 trillion. That’s up from $11.5 trillion in 2005, the last year the left-leaning group released estimates.

Citizens for Tax Justice estimates that the US Treasury is losing an estimated $90 billion each year from corporate giants — and an additional $40 billion to $70 billion from wealthy individuals who squirrel funds in offshore tax havens.

Congressional analysts say Uncle Sam could rake in an extra $600 billion over the next decade simply by ending the corporate tax exemption that permits US companies to defer payments through complex overseas tax dodges.

To get the money home without paying full US taxes on it, some advocate a change in the tax law.

Apple is a member of Working to Invest Now in America, or WinAmerica. The business coalition is lobbying for two congressional bills that would temporarily reduce the tax rate on repatriated earnings to 5.25 percent. That would encourage the repatriation of much of the cash that US companies have sitting in overseas accounts, the group says.

As a precedent, the temporary tax amnesty enacted in 2004 resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars being brought home.

Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Cisco are also members of WinAmerica, but none of them stand to gain as much as Apple from a tax amnesty, because they have less cash overseas.

source: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/us_tech_investors_hurt_by_offshore_uO01HlnANHJvVd9l8XU6jN?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=%0a%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20Business

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Why Do We Need DevOps?

In the past year, untraditional system administrators and software developers coming from western countries were all the time talking about a new concept: DevOps. DevOps is the combination of development and operations. (DevOps also includes product management, QA and sales)

The broken

Why do we have to combine the two fields? The first reason is that our working process is broken, totally broken. Development department and operation department in many companies are in conflict, because of the “broken”.

Let me take the example of distributing software products. The development department is going to develop a new product, which will use the latest and the most dazzling technology to meet all the fancy needs of the customers, so that they can bring millions dollars profit to the company. This product is required to use the newest technology and platform and is due in a short time. As a result, the development department work day and night, and cuts code like crazy and finally complete the task in time. Then they dumped all their work to the operation department, but the latter has not been ready for task, while the former cannot wait to celebrate the accomplishment of their task.

Receiving the product, everyone in the operation department is afraid.

Here are the reasons why they are afraid:

1) This excellent product cannot perform on the current platform, because the platform is too old (or lacks space, does not support some versions).

2) The product’s architecture is not suitable for our storage (or network, distribution, security) models.

3) We cannot figure out the report (or security, supervision, backup, service provision), so we cannot make it real and useful.

Complaining and cursing all the time, the operation department installs the product finally. Unfortunately, due to some poor adjustments and unreasonable compulsive operations, and the performance of the product is finally described as “Epic Fail”.

The disappointed operation department starts to record all the problems and talk about the issues with the development department. But most responses of the development department are like this:

1) It is not our fault. Out codes are perfect. The distribution is too bad.

2) The operation department sucks. They don’t know the new technology.

3) It is OK when performing on my machine.

The communication between two departments soon becomes a conflict. The clients (and share holders, the investor and the manage level) suffer the loss. At last, the company loses a lot of money, and all lose their jobs. It is an epic fail.

How different is DevOps? What are the advantages of it?

DevOps is not only a method for software deployment. It enables the creator of the software (development department) and the operator (operation department) to collaborate in a new way. The two departments will interact better with the DevOps model, and the relationship between them will be improved, so that they will benefit a lot in many aspects, such as automation, supervision, capacity planning and performance, backup and recovery, security, network and service provisioning and so on.

Four things about DevOps are very important.

Simple

The KISS (Keep it simple and stupid) principle is very important. The simplicity saves time for writing texts, training and providing support. Simplicity speeds up the communication, avoids the confusion, and reduces the risks of mistakes of development and operation. Simplicity enables us to release products as soon as possible.

Relationship between departments

Developers should let operators participate in the process of development, and share the project plan, new technologies and opinions with operators. Operators should also let the developers get involved when coming across problems and invite them to attend the meetings, share roadmaps and make plans together.

Here are some ways to communicate. The effectiveness declines from the top to the bottom.

1) Face to face

2) Video meetings

3) Telephone

4) Instant communication software

5) Email

Work process

All the process of different fields should be connected. The fields include: deployment, supervision, capacity planning and so on. In logic, “deployment” is the last link in the software development circle, so it belongs to the development process, not the operation process.

Conclusion

As far as I am concerned, DevOps is about who to work with and how to work together. The most attractive part of it is it calls different people in different department and solve the problems together. Such work environment is what I am always dreaming of.

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