Want redundancy, want to eliminate redundancy

Having spent years in the telecommunications industry, designing systems that are up more than 99.999% of the time meant complex architectural decisions and incorporating redundancy in many aspects of the system. Customers demanded that level of performance, and were willing to pay for it. However, firms like Cisco proved that dP/dQ, the first derivative of Price w.r.t. reliability Q was high and d/dQ (dP/dQ), the second derivative, was positive, and that customers could get a slightly lower reliability level at a much lower price point. Customers bought into that argument.

During the past decade, firms have eliminated redundancy, especially in operations involving humans. They have extracted significant financial gains, sometimes at the cost of a lower level of reliability and customer satisfaction. The following article reveals that firms want geographical redundancy to eliminate geo-political risks, but do want their outsourcing partners like Infosys to help eliminate redundancy in the outsourcer's operations.

Big IT moves more work, jobs to China - The Economic Times: "As the Chinese pitter-patter into IT services turns into a loud clatter, Indian majors are pushing hard to grab a bigger slice of that market. TCS, Infosys and Wipro plan to shift at least 10% of their new outsourcing projects to Chinese cities of Dalian and Chengdu, for the first time since India’s software exports industry took note of the Chinese threat a decade ago.

Top customers like GE and General Motors are demanding that Indian vendors deliver some services from locations outside India because of geo-political risks and location redundancy. India’s tech behemoths are also realising that by creating local jobs in China, they can gain a bigger share of the Dragonland’s $10-billion-plus outsourcing market.

While TCS plans to increase its existing 1,200-employee base by over five times in the next few years, Infosys will invest $100 million to build a 4,000-professional-strong team. Wipro, the third-biggest software exporter, will have around 1,000 professionals in a year’s time."