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Volume 13, Number 14 -- April 5, 2004

Gartner: Offshore or Lose


by Alex Woodie

Companies and individuals that want to survive should consider how they can move technology jobs offshore, Gartner chief executive officer Michael Fleisher said last week at the Gartner Symposium in San Diego. In no uncertain terms, the head of the industry's leading IT analyst group gave a rousing thumbs-up to the controversial practice that has sent more than a hundred thousand American tech jobs overseas, and will undoubtedly take many more.

In this election year, the growing movement of high-paying technology jobs to low-wage countries such as India and China is hotly divisive issue. A new study just released by the Information Technology Association of America says that, between 2000 to 2003, 104,000 American technology jobs, or 3 percent of the total, were outsourced to low-wage countries, such as India, where programmers are paid one-sixth what they are in the U.S. The ITTA says the flow of money for offshoring will increase an average of 26 percent per year through 2008, when $31 billion will be spent.

In his keynote address last week, Fleisher encouraged attendees to look beyond the fear and blame that has been directed at offshore outsourcing, especially by politicians who equivocate offshoring with treason. "We all work in a highly competitive global marketplace," Fleisher says. "This is the world we have created for ourselves . . . Nobody's at fault. It's an inevitable outcome of today's global marketplace."

Fleisher presented an optimistic view of offshoring, and said there is nothing new about job losses created by technology. Americans have managed to make themselves employable as technology caused massive shifts in employment patterns, from agriculture to manufacturing, and from manufacturing to services. The Internet-fueled shift in white-collar IT jobs based here is no different, and in any event, the new jobs created today by offshoring will be gone in a few years anyway, he said. Besides, the United States is the best at adapting to changes like these, he said. "The countries that win will have populations educated at the highest levels," he said.

Fleisher's positive view of offshoring is backed by the new ITAA study, which found that offshoring, in the end, "increases the number of U.S. jobs, improves real wages for American workers, and push[es] the U.S. economy to perform at a higher level." The study also found that the activity of "worldwide sourcing of IT services and software" (the ITAA term for offshoring) actually created 90,000 U.S. jobs last year, and will create another 225,000 new jobs by 2008. These are the jobs that Fleisher encouraged Gartner Symposium attendees--who are IT professionals and IT executives at some of the largest companies in the country--to seek by retraining and educating themselves on outsourcing and offshoring strategies.

Please participate in our iSeries programming survey at
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=74193419903

When it comes to offshoring at your company, don't be a deal inhibitor, Fleisher advised. Instead, "become an authority on sourcing strategies" by educating and training yourself on the issues and the technologies that allow it to happen. "CIOs need to become outsourcing authorities that companies can't do without," he said. "If you don't move to direct sources in your organization, you'll be bypassed by other executives."

Instead of complaining about offshoring, Fleisher encouraged attendees to become masters of outsourcing and offshoring strategies, and to turn potential negatives into positives for themselves. These are issues that "tech executives are uniquely qualified to meet," Fleisher said. "You know how to do it better than anybody else in your company. That's why you are qualified to lead this charge."

At times, Fleisher's keynote sounded like something one might here at a motivational seminar given by somebody like Tony Robbins. He told the audience that "enormous wealth on a global scale" is at stake here, and with the right "wisdom," "vision," and "understanding" you can "dominate" the next generation of jobs by effectively wielding technology in pursuit of offshoring. "The future will be bright indeed for those who understand and exploit this technology."

Sponsored By
ARCAD

ARCAD Software:
Optimizes your software supply chain across multi-platforms

THE PROBLEM

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A large number of iSeries customers, if not all, work not only with native development but also with many other development platforms such as Windows, UNIX and more recently Linux. These applications are very often connected with the database or other iSeries objects. This brings with it many problems, all related to the complexity of administrating heterogeneous environments:

  • Is it possible to manage all developments centrally?
  • Can we implement the same level of methodology on all platforms?
  • How can we measure the impact of a modification on a native component on other external components?
  • How can we synchronize the transfer to production process for inter-dependent components and platforms?

THE SOLUTION

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The solution to these problems is provided by combining:

  • The IBM iSeries Integrated File System capability, which stores all component types on a single machine.
  • The ARCAD-Skipper suite to catalog all components, native and heterogeneous, and all changes to components, according to the same methodology.

At ARCAD Software, our mission is to provide concrete and workable solutions for iSeries centric software configuration management. Initiated twelve years ago, the ARCAD Software solutions benefit from a totally innovative approach and a unique architecture.

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AN INTEGRATED APPROACH

Putting in place a change management toolset is a prerequisite for evolving an information system with maximum productivity and security. But alone it is still far from sufficient, a cross reference tool is both complementary, and indispensable to the developer. The two requirements are closely linked. ARCAD Software is the only vendor to propose a global approach to this dual need: via its integrated repository, it offers full registration of software components and also complete cross-referencing down to the field level and the source lines.

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A UNIQUE INFORMATION SOURCE

Supported by the ARCAD-Open Repository, ARCAD-Skipper brings to the developer both a constant information source and a controlled structure. It offers:

  • An high-granularity impact analysis system,
  • Up to 100% automation of compilation phases.

Furthermore, the repository will also be used to carry out automatic integrity checks on versions. The consistency of relations such as source/object, file/program, COPY clause/program is automatically checked before any transfer to test or transfer to production. In the same way, ARCAD will check relations with IFS components. Thus, even in a multi-platform configuration, it is possible to guarantee the same level of consistency.

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A TOTALLY MULTI-PLATFORM APPROACH

Thanks to the invaluable operating system advance, the Integrated File System (IFS), you can transform your iSeries platform into a "sentry", securing your entire application set. ARCAD-Skipper uses the IFS as the foundation for its version management functions. This approach guarantees:

  • Referencing of your entire set of software components (iSeries, Windows, UNIX/Linux) in a single and shared repository,
  • Physical security of components,
  • Versioning of components with integrated archiving,
  • Organization of the change process,
  • Management of synchronized deployments in heterogeneous environments.

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UNIQUE CUSTOMIZATION FEATURES

Another important aspect of the product is its customization capability. In the change management domain, high flexibility is needed to adapt to an existing organization. Each customer has their own standards and configuration particularities. We have overcome this problem at ARCAD with the help of our internal macro language. This internal language is unique in the market. All transfer to test and transfer to production processes, and also distribution and installation on remote machines, are defined in the form of macro-commands. Standard macros are provided with the product and can be adapted to the customer's particular needs.

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SIMPLE TO IMPLEMENT

At the same time as being highly customizable, ARCAD-Skipper is extremely simple to put in place. This is achieved by delivering with the product a complete pre-configuration corresponding to the large majority of customer needs.


STRONG POINTS AND BENEFITS

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Integration

One of the major characteristics of the ARCAD-Skipper suite is to offer at the same time a functional and a technical view of the information system. In this way it brings both security to the change cycle of software components, and also complete control over the knowledge of an information system. Being totally integrated in this way, ARCAD-Skipper reaps the benefits of any integrated product:

  • Total consistency and non-redundancy of its database,
  • A single and consistent user interface,

Reliability

It is not worth spending large sums of money to ensure high availability in terms of hardware and data if, at the same time, we cannot guarantee high availability of the application itself. ARCAD-Skipper acts as the guarantor of this high application availability.

Consistency

ARCAD-Skipper allows software change to be tackled in a more controlled and systematic manner. The integration, even temporary, of new team members will not destabilize the project, since successive developers working on the IS will all work in the same structured methodological framework.


A PROGRESSIVE SOLUTION

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ARCAD-Skipper is an open solution that can be complemented by other software suites in our range:

ARCAD-Observer: application MINING and retro-documentation

This suite offers a toolkit to facilitate the understanding of the internal architecture of your applications, and allows the same information to be synthesized into technical documentation. It ensures methodology in the update of this documentation, thanks to an integrated project management and the identification of modified components.
The documents in HTML format can be transferred to an intranet for easy sharing.

ARCAD-Observer is an indispensable and complementary tool to the ARCAD-Skipper change management solution.

ARCAD-Customer: management of technical support, 100% internet/intranet

ARCAD-Customer will increase the efficiency to your technical support, as it is the first Help-Desk solution to be both intranet/internet and oriented towards application maintenance. Thanks to its integration with the ARCAD-Skipper version management, you can fully customize your communication with users. With ARCAD-Customer, interaction with users becomes transparent.
This product benefits from original features such as preventive maintenance and "patch" management.

ARCAD-Qualifier: Control of test phases

This suite consists of three solutions key to the success of your application testing:

  • A non-regression test robot, or record and play tool, allowing the definition of functional scenarios, and the automated replay of these scenarios at each version change.
  • A dynamic code analyzer, capable of revealing which parts of the code have not been tested, and ensuring that code modifications are tested.
  • A test data extractor, allowing extracts of the production database to be taken while preserving referential integrity. With this solution, you control:
    o The disk space required by your tests,
    o The regular renewal of test data,
    o The reproduction of errors in production.

ARCAD-Transformer: 100 % automated impact analysis

This software suite allows you to undertake large database transformation projects in complete confidence.

It will produce a detailed impact analysis down to the source line level and offers an automatic source transformation mechanism

This suite will bring both productivity gains and greater reliability to your software evolutions.

For additional information, call 800-676-4709.
Visit Arcad at www.arcadsoftware.com

Please participate in our iSeries programming survey at
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=74193419903

Editor: Timothy Prickett Morgan
Managing Editor: Shannon Pastore
Contributing Editors: Dan Burger, Joe Hertvik, Kevin Vandever,
Shannon O'Donnell, Victor Rozek, Hesh Wiener, Alex Woodie
Publisher and Advertising Director: Jenny Thomas
Advertising Sales Representative: Kim Reed
Contact the Editors: To contact anyone on the IT Jungle Team
Go to our contacts page and send us a message.

THIS ISSUE
SPONSORED BY:

Bytware
SoftLanding Systems
BCD Int'l
ARCAD
Cosyn Software


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Gartner: Offshore or Lose

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