About: Mani Malarvannan

Mani Malarvannan

Website: http://www.cybelink.com

Profile: My name is Mani Malarvannan, I have been working in IT consulting since 1993, I live and work in Twin Cities, Minnesota. I started reading about outsourcing from 1998 and started writing about it from 2006.

Posts by Mani Malarvannan:

  • Does outsourcing really kill innovation?

    Recently I read a blog in the Harvard Business Review web site. It is an interesting blog that discusses outsourcing and IT innovation. The blog suggests that large scale IT outsourcing limits strategic value of companies and limits innovation using IT as a strategic asset. It is sad that still blogs and articles are being written questioning the value of outsourcing and connecting company’s lagging innovation to outsourcing. Most of the Fortune 1000 companies in US have fully-owned subsidiaries in emerging countries like China, India, Brazil, Philippines, etc. US companies have been sending work from US to its subsidiaries all over the world. What do you call this practice? Outsourcing, offshore outsourcing, insourcing? Read more

  • Rapid Scalability of Complex and Dynamic Web-Based Systems: Challenges and Recent Approaches to Mitigation

    Authors: Mani Malarvannan and S. Ramaswamy
    (Published in IEEE SOSE 2010)

    In this paper, we summarize and outline some of the big challenges in addressing performance, scalability, and availability of applications with large and complex backend database systems. We present some of the limitations imposed by the CAP theorem on distributed systems development and identify some approaches that can be used to effectively address these limitations. We propose the adoption of an effective System-of-Systems approach that pushes adoption of principles supported by loosely-coupled SPU based architecture, which can support incremental development and rapid scalability of such complex and dynamic applicative needs. Read more

  • Can companies outsource product development for innovation?

    In April 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review I read an interesting news about outsourcing product development and innovation. It was mentioned that companies cannot benefit outsourcing product development if it is too simple or too complex, companies can benefit if the product development is moderately complex. I could not find the entire article published in Acemadey of Management review. But I do not agree the notation that companies benefit from outsourcing only moderately complex product development for two main reasons: Read more

  • Does Business Process Standardization help BPO?

    We all know how outsource companies brag about their CMM level, Six Sigma, COPC – 2000, etc. Two years back I wrote an article explaining how business process standardization helps customers in their outsourcing projects. Last week I read an article in Harvard Business Review, When Should a Process Be Art, Not Science? that made me to think about standardization and BPO. Read more

  • Current trends in offshore outsourcing

    US financial crisis that started in 2008 changed several industries permanently; offshore outsourcing is not immune to the changes. Top outsource vendors successfully managed the global recession by adopting different global delivery models and by understanding customer’s business started providing direct business value in the projects. Customers from their part started managing their outsource vendors more efficiently and with better performance metrics they started getting maximum benefits in minimum cost. Read more

  • Can globalization be stopped?

    Current economic slump may slow down the globalization but it will not stop it. Though G20 countries may increase protectionism they cannot reverse the globalization trends. If they try to reverse then it would have negative impacts on their economy like increase in layoffs, increase in price for goods and services, etc. For example President Bush introduced steel tariffs and lifted it couple of years back due to protection from WTO. But it does not save the US steel industry; in contrast it affected the US automobile industry directly. Since the US car makers need to pay more for the steel than their foreign competitors they increased the price and customers bought more imported cars. Read more

  • Can President Obama alter offshore outsourcing for US companies?

    President Obama’s new tax proposal has been widely discussed topic in the offshore outsource industry for the past month or so.  Read more

  • Managing Offshore Software Teams

    The effect of Globalization touched all industries and jobs; software development is no different. Now a days software developers working for a company are physically separated with each other and they may be in different timezones within in a country or anywhere in the world. Companies often outsource software development projects to countries like India, China, Russia, etc. and they also started using crowdsourcing web sites for all their software development efforts. Read more

  • Offshore Outsourcing Commoditization

    Today I was reading the article India Is Losing its Share of Offshoring Market, following are the main reasons quoted by the Gartner analyst for India to lose offshore outsourcing market share:
    Read more

  • Green Cloud Outsourcing

    I did not know that IT industry is putting as much carbon as the airline industry until I read the Hardvard Business Blog on cloud computing. As you all know cloud computing is the hottest topic in IT and with its promise of reducing IT infrastructure and their by reducing energy usage will definitevely appeal to all the businesses. Also President Obama administration with green initiative will further enforce the growth of green and cloud computing in US.
    Read more

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