Outsourcing Infrastructure Management

October 17th, 2008 by Julia Lim

Have you experienced this? You call [fill in the blank] tech support and reach “Bob Smith” whose accent doesn’t quite match the name. If you’re like me, you wonder two things: is his name really Bob Smith? And if it’s not, why is he lying?

Is it supposed to make me feel better about getting my problem fixed if I’m talking to someone in the Midwest versus someone in Bangalore? (Please no hate mail – I’m from the Midwest.) Honestly, I just want my computer to stop showing me a blue screen of death.

But apparently, I might be in the minority. According to the Black Book of Outsourcing (yes, outsourcing has a black book), reverse outsourcing is on the rise with “India’s leading service providers opening offices on Main Street, USA” to be closer to customers (mainly North American) and draw from the “local talent pools”.

The one area of outsourcing bucking this trend – infrastructure management. Co-writer Scott Wilson says that infrastructure management is largely automated, low touch and does not involve a lot of interaction.

Speaking as a vendor of infrastructure management tools, that’s a bunch of malarkey. Perhaps at a very low level this is true (i.e., is the device responding), but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to monitoring performance, availability and SLAs for today’s networks, systems and applications.

Certainly as vendors, we try to put as much automation as possible into our toolsets – helping our customers to simplify IT management wherever possible, enabling them to be proactive by setting up “intelligent” alarms and thresholds that warn of problems before they become showstoppers and reacting at a speed in this increasingly virtual world that simply is not possible for human manual interaction.

But infrastructure management doesn’t happen in a vacuum and you can bet when something goes wrong which affects some mission-critical app state-side, that there is a LOT of communication and interaction. And it takes a lot of work and setup to get to a level of automation where the alerting is proactive and intelligent and customized for each business.

One of the main points of tools like ours is to automate where possible in order to free up the valuable time of the sysadmins, network engineers, IT managers, etc to do the higher order work – which is how they’ll get to the next level of infrastructure management. Beyond “is it up”, infrastructure management should be providing answers to questions like: “is it always up”, “is it doing what I expected it to do” and “will it still be working as expected as my company grows”.

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2 comments October 17th, 2008

2 Comments Add your own

1. Take off your protectionist blinders - some jobs are coming back to the US | October 20th, 2008 at 10:57 am

You isolated the points Black Book made instead of crossing them, which takes some creativity from the IT user perspective to understand the entire issue which is sweeping the outsourcing industry.

1. Local or Home-shored representatives – or communications – are required to assure those very aspects of Infrastructure are carried out precisely and with some vertical expertise.

2. Reverse Outsourcing is a wave of industry evolution which is creating jobs in the US and UK for these types of technological geniuses.

3. Infrastructure services which are performed in the back office – programming by the specs of the American and UK conduit reps, highly technical services which are performed per the requirements of the clients and determined by the US /UK local conduit – are the functions that can be performed in an offshore location.

4. There will always be a business case for labor arbitrage and cost savings – the best place for those are in the subfunctions of IT infrastructure which do not require much – if any -human-to-human contact.

5. Those positions which require that very human-to-human contact are the ones that are returning to the US in sizable number.

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2. Julia Lim | October 20th, 2008 at 4:10 pm

Thanks for the clarification on this – I’ll fully admit that I didn’t read the entire Black Book, merely gave it as a reference here. My comments were directed more at the comments made about infrastructure management by the co-writer. I think we can both agree that infrastructure management is a pretty broad field and the blanket statement that was made could be misleading.
Re protectionist blinders? Not sure I understand your point here. My point is that I actually didn’t care where the work is being done – just that it should get done by qualified individuals wherever that may be and of course based upon the economics that make sense. How is that protectionist?

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