In the Viewpoint section of Bloomberg / Businessweek in a post titled “The End of Outsourcing (As We Know It)” Arjun Sethi and Oliver Aries highlight the major changes taking place in outsourcing. It seems that they are moving to the Clouds – cloud computing that is. With companies still ruthlessly seeking new economies of scale to reduce costs that the cloud is where the trend is now heading. First it was to India, and then other offshore locations where labor was cheap and local moguls build large infrastructures to handle the complex transactions at a fraction of the cost of in the U.S.
They follow the trends of the last several decades as we computerized everything, marched from mainframes to PC’s, and from internal staff to the extensive use of consultants – mainly the big firms. Costs shifted, but the shift continues.
Now the trend is to cloud computing and this will impact both the large offshore firms, mainly in India, and the large consultancies like Accenture. Who will benefit – surprise, it will be Google and Amazon who have both built the right kinds of infrastructure, systems and software to lead us down the next path. Even Microsoft could be a winner if they can further develop their own version of software on demand, cloud style, and make it a wide spread winner. They could certainly use one.
Off now to the closet to fetch my raincoat – I hear the clouds are coming my way.
I am 
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Note from the trusty admin here:
We’re actually using amazon’s s3 storage for the new server setup (for images only) here on AnalogSherpa.com And if there were a blog solution on google’s app engine i’m sure i’d take a good look at it.
it’s a fascinating evolution — it really is the matrix in so many ways. we are increasingly becoming cybernetic, a deeply-integrated blend of living tissue and silicon and fiber optics. and b/c humans evolve more slowly than programs advance, eventually the majority of us are bound to be out of work….or need to find something new to do.
enter systems like amazon’s mechanical turk, aol’s seed.com, demand media’s algorithmic content creation system, 99designs and the other logo-on-demand bidding systems, etc.
there’s still the need for human input to fill the gaps that technology can’t reach…but we have to be careful that we don’t slow our own evolutionary path down and settle for just creating technology to do all the jobs/processes we did in the 20th century. we have to use technology to do bigger/better things, or we’ll all wind up replaced by machines and incapable of doing anything better than the robots and cyborgs and programs.