If that data is their customers’ – it is NOT theirs to play with.
And any improvements and automation in such data can only be delivered right
back to their customer and nobody else, there’s enough NDAs around for that
plus serious penalties for when they try to leverage a resource they have
available in one team for another team. TCS found that out the hard way in
that Kaiser Permanente case where a former member on their team for that client
continued to use his (still active and not shut down as their famed process
orientedness should have made them do) kp.com login credentials to access tech
support manuals on behalf of another client that he was not licensed for. And
then shared that credential across several other teams, including those that
developed a competitor to that very software. [add “allegedly” to taste for
all this, these are the allegations made by the plaintiff against TCS anyway].
If there’s some software they make that they sell to customers, they would have
to be dumb indeed not to leverage the hilt out of any and every bit of
analytics and telemetry they get their hands on, but I’m the last person to
accuse more than one player in the Indian software industry of intelligence.
--srs
On 19/10/16, 11:06 AM, "silklist on behalf of Bhaskar Dasgupta"
<silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus....@lists.hserus.net on behalf of
bdasgu...@gmail.com> wrote:
one of the examples I had asked to be funded was to leverage their data.
this company manages banking processes. what i wanted was to tie up with ISI
(not that one) and hire a small skunk work of data scientists and a data design
/ visualisation centre. And then wanted to do what rolls royce have done with
their trent engines - they make a stupendous amount of money by monitoring
their engines on a real time basis in flight and saving airlines shed loads of
dosh. So i would’ve provided a set of tools, constantly evolving, to the heads
of operations on their process flows, heads of sales on sales analytics, heads
of product design on competitive features, and so on and so forth. And once I
have sufficient coverage, I can setup a banking product market place. World
Domination! result? god no, we cant pay these phd’s that much! no? then you
will lose them to american firms who can and will. but that will cause the pay
scales to be fucked up internally. ok, lets spin off this firm. we don’t do
spinoffs. why? 100% owned subsidiaries are good and actually you can IPO it as
their multiples will be better. Oh! that decision is above my pay grade (this
is the president of the division!) you can fuck off. /facepalm.
forget about creating new products, buggers don’t even leverage what they
have! they are sitting on a fucking gold mine of rivers of data (if you don’t
mind me mangling metaphors) and are happy to sit there and fish for minnows or
get paid lowly for tending the sodding river bank.
> On 19 Oct 2016, at 06:06, Suresh Ramasubramanian <sur...@hserus.net>
wrote:
>
> IT companies buying product companies in a desperate bid to innovate ..
let us just say that I’ve seen a lot of that happen at a previous workplace.
>
> The usual end result is that the founders and key employees quit in
disgust after a while and those that are left are gradually absorbed into the
company doing something totally different than what they set out to do.
>
> And meanwhile the product itself is killed off immediately, or maybe dies
a slow and lingering death with a few legacy customers left behind and
practically zero further development.
>
> Big companies that don’t have DNA beyond being pushers of software that
most if not all users have a visceral hatred for, and/or bloated services
contracts, are absolutely not going to infuse any magical fresh DNA into them
by acquiring successful product companies
>
> The prospect of such foreign DNA taking root in the company is far less
than in the case of an organ transplant – the sort you get in mad scientist
movies where a scientist transplants human dna / tissue / whatever into an ape
and suddenly ends up with a super intelligent planet of the apes or Gorilla
Grodd variety animal.
>
> Mohandas Pai is a smug and opinionated twit but he got one thing right
though. The software industry didn’t die – it will survive and it will probably
hang on, but the traditional indian (or even foreign) services model is long
dead in favour of automation. The only things that won’t be automated to a
large extent are higher up the value chain than such companies generally play
around at. And the hanging on will be the way a really old and sick man keeps
hanging on – perpetually in the chasm between Allopathy and Tirupathi.
>
> In other words, the days of 15% raises are dead and gone, companies
outsourcing basic bargain basement sysadmin and datacentre work will outsource
far less after automating the hell out of everything they can, testing will be
automated.
>
> Of all the cash cows out there, telemarketing and support still needs
humans to a larger extent and will hang on but higher up the value chain –
because a lot of it has moved to social media, marketing rules in this space
have tightened etc.
>
> And even that is going way down after all the tech support scams in India
that flourish tarring even the legit players with the same brush, with at least
some of the legit players looking wistfully at the “upsell” angle that, if
pushed a few hairs farther down the line, becomes those scams where someone
claims to be “tech support” for your OS or device manufacturer and cons you
into paying for a $50 a month perpetual contract.
>
> --srs
>
> On 19/10/16, 10:15 AM, "silklist on behalf of Deepak Shenoy"
<silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus....@lists.hserus.net on behalf of
deepakshe...@capitalmind.in> wrote:
>
> Apologies for the plug but I wrote a piece a year back:
> http://capitalmind.in/2015/01/the-inflexion-point-
> for-the-it-service-industry-long/
>
> So my point is that the problem isn't with IT companies - they will
survive
> as IBM and HP etc have, and perhaps grow in single digit percentages
and
> generally get a lot lower price to earnings multiples. They do stuff
no one
> currently wants to do and overhauling a system to use stuff that other
> smart people want to use is too expensive. (Like COBOL - it may be
outdated
> and all that but it still forms the basis for an irrationally large
part of
> banking) This work will continue until you have removed the very need
for
> the basis that the older software has been required, so there will
always
> be business for the Infy/TCS/Cognizant types from this kind of
maintenance
> work.
>
> But things can change very fast. 10 years ago I couldn't imagine that
BigCo
> would be able to manage something like 5000 servers using less than 5
> people including bringing more up when required, at run time, with
complete
> reporting/control available even on a mobile phone app. It's possible
now.
> It's routine now. And as more companies are discovering it is, the
on-site
> and off-site infrastructure work that was handled by the IT cos has
seen
> dwindling business. SAP now offers a cloud based pre-setup solution,
where
> you need none of the server infrastructure - only the initialization
pieces
> which the IT cos still do; but at some point SAP will create modules
that
> are one-click installs for the kind of industry you are in.
>
> Automation isn't robotics - you don't need machine learning or AI for
most
> of the work required. For instance much of the testing work that is
done
> tends to be checklist driven, and some of that has already been
automated
> at multiple levels using tools. What these IT cos should have been
doing is
> buying the product companies that build these tools, but they simply
don't
> have the DNA. (I would even say buy minority stakes in them with a
board
> seat) Their own products are absolutely crap; see the quality of the
stuff
> TCS and Infy have built for say the MCA, versus teh quality of design
that
> seems to be in teh new Modi camp (vidyutpravah.in for instance or
such).
>
> I heard of a bigco - a friend works there - where an insurance company
was
> being pitched by various vendors for a certain solution. The big Indian
> names went in with the powerpoint smoke and mirrors thing and offered
> things like 6 months to a year to finish with X headcount etc. A
russian
> company with the founders as programmers pitched a working prototype
that
> they said would take a couple more weeks to finalize and they'd get it
live
> in amonth at a cost that was not even in the same area code forget the
> ballpark. They actually won the project and BigCo guys had multiple
> meetings to "create risk mitigation techniques" and such things. It's
kinda
> funny.
>
> I think if IT cos react, they will get lean. If they get lean, many
many
> people - and I'm speaking thousands in bangalore alone - will find out
that
> their skills are drastically short of the real world requirement of
jobs.
> This is the problem - not that the IT cos won't survive. IMHO.
>
> Deepak Shenoy
> Capital Mind: Financial Macro and Market Analytics
> http://capitalmind.in
> Twitter: @deepakshenoy
>
> On 16 October 2016 at 15:34, Bhaskar Dasgupta <bdasgu...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
>> i was interviewing for one of the IT corporates some time back for their
>> COO position and once i managed to dig a bit into their financials, i
>> backed out. the majority of their revenue streams are from processing in
>> advanced stuff, processing code, processing transactions, processing
>> quality control. They do this very well. Very very well. standardise the
>> process, six sigma the shit out of it, hire the great unwashed herd of
>> graduates pouring out of the universities - retrain them to be great
>> processors and great business model. But this kind of model is very
>> susceptible to dis-intermediation from further advances in technology.
When
>> I asked if can have some serious seed funding to develop products rather
>> than just provide services, there was a bit of a hoo ha. I think a
product
>> plus service model is the best option, create great products and then
have
>> a long tail in services and maintenance contracts. we have some of these
>> products but not enough. not easy to develop products - the eco-system
>> isn’t there yet.
>>
>> so whilst i don’t think its the end of the road, but for example, every 2
>> months I am in a conference where vendors pitch up talking about robotic
>> process improvement or AI and how they are showing 20–50% reduction in
warm
>> bodies in agency/outsourced/offshored units. Where will these 20-50% of
>> highly trained processors go when the infosys or TCS lets them go?
>> Thankfully the economy is ginormous and we are well accustomed to poverty
>> and pain and still have the joint / extended family to fall back upon.
But
>> for the IT industry? pain...
>>
>> i agree with Srini, changing careers is not easy for us desi’s….(says the
>> man who has made a career of changing careers, heh).
>>
>
>
>
>
