Off Shoring Virtual Application Creation

There also used to be a place in Lunemborg, I think.  In addition, I know HP has a practice based in India for HP customers.

When a company asks me about outsourcing I always ask a few questions.  The conversation usually goes like this.

Q: Do you plan to outsource everything, or only some and do others in house?

A: Just some.  We have inhouse folks capable of some of the load.

Q: So you are going to send out the standard, straightforward easy stuff?

A:  Oh no.  The hard ones we don't have time to figure out.

Q:  I see.  So are you willing to pay by the hour?

A: No.  It has to be fixed price!

The problem, of course, is that an off-shore solution only works for applications that do not need customer specific customizations.  In practice, almost every app has customer specfic customizations.  Take office.  Pretty straightforward (although always a bear to sequence), until you think about Outlook.  Oh, you need it customized to connect up to your exchange server.  Anything that talks to a back-end database is out of the question.  And then there are those app combinations.  This piece with that java and another front end from a third party.  Most of the effort on sequencing those things tends to be just figuring out how to actually install the combination on a machine - forget about sequencing.

Beyond those an outsource can't do because they aren't on site, you do have the issue of costs.  Sure, Adobe Reader is probably OK without customizations and doesn't need back end testing on site.  The outsourcer does it once and it should be fixed price and cheap.  Because of the ease of that application, that turns out not to be the application that enterprises want to outsource. 

Without a huge volume, outsourcing just can't pay out for the outsourcer without variable costs.  So folks continue to be out there - I just don't hear of anyone actually using them, although someone must be at least using them as a local contract agency on-site and they hope to expand out.  [But please, someone post their experiences so I can stop saying that!]

Hi Tim

You point out some very common problems with off-shoring applications, and to an extent I agree with you. I am also certain that off-shoring is not right for everyone.

However Virtual App Factory (VAF) has worked for a number of companies where it really has worked. As  you know “virtualisation” is the hot topic of the moment, every company wants to do it, but the problem is that how many resellers, EI’s or contractors who are out there at the moment can offer the skills to do this properly? – not many. This is certainly the case in the UK and judging by the interest VAF is getting from the United States and the rest of Europe there is a general skills shortage here too.

VAF, with the knowledge from highly experienced consultants from add3 can offer the standards and best practise framework to prepare your applications in a proper way from the start. As I am sure you know yourself a small error in your naming convention can cause all sorts of problems down the line, we aim to remove these gotcha’s.

I hope that I got across in my interview with Michel Roth that VAF’s approach off-shoring as a partnership with our customers. We have all seen in the past companies just send off a load of media and magically expect to receive it all back fully sequenced or MSI’d in a couple of weeks and that’s the end of it. As you have so rightly said – it doesn’t work like that. VAF ensure that our customer understands that this is a two way process, our SoftGrid / Thinstall expertise along with their expert knowledge of their applications.

We have had some good success recently by sequencing remotely, i.e. using a machine on the customer site to sequence on. This gets around the old back-end issue and allows us to follow test scripts on a client in the actual environment. All we need is remote access to a few VM’s.

Who is off-shoring? Although it is not for me to print their name here, there is a large financial institution in the UK that has had approx 800 applications sequenced in this way.

In summary, I mostly agree with your post, and off-shoring is not for everyone, but VAF believe that we have found a way to make it work well in the majority of cases.

Regards

Dan

Sorry Dan, but I have to agree 100% with Tim. Our internal "Offshore" folks are damn near useless, without explicit step-by-step instructions, and even then it's a crap shoot. With the amount of time required to document and test every task that they are supposed to perform, a domestic team could have gotten three times the work done, without rework. And, our experiences with offshore vendor experiences haven't been any better...

Fortunately, with the decreasing cost efficiencies, I think some large enterprises are beginning to figure out that off-shore wasn't/isn't the panacea that they thought that it was...

Surely it's the "near useless" folks you're using that are at fault rather than the concept of outsourcing your sequencing? 

You could say the same about any outsourced resource - if they're not doing their job properly then either the processes, communications or skill sets in place are in need of 'correction'! ; )

I've had over ten years experience packaging apps and I'm still skeptical of that sort of product unless you focus your packaging team at a specific industry and learn to tackle the hard apps so that they become easer to deal with and hopefully increase your margin. I view packaging much like programming or an accounting application implementation, there are blocks that have some similar structure but the actual implementation is going to have many parameters that make it a custom job nearly every time. A simple change such as adding a registry value could be a complete disaster depending on how the vendor coded their MSI and application virtualization can enter similar areas where one piece of functionality is deemed critical and it doesn't function within that environment.

I've been part of some remote packaging initiates such as an oil company in Equador but the problem isn't so much doing the remote packaging but getting the proper inputs into the scripting team. How many times has a customer said "that looks great but I forgot to tell you that feature x needs setting y". Also there is the problem with getting the customer to test in a timely fashion so that defects can be identified quickly. How many times have I waited months for testing to get a failure report then the comment "we need to get this into production next week".

Setting expectations with the client is essential becuase so many customers don't get packaging and why managed software delivery takes time. I've had a CIO say "I don't get what the fuss is about, I put in my CD and five minutes later my app is installed". I've seen companies run that way then they wonder why their desktops / citrix servers are so unstable. Maybe I'm ranting but doing packaging remotely is a reality and since many organizations don't know how to produce good packagers I do see a market opportunity to outsource. As with any consulting relationship results will vary with the quality of expertise you employ.