Outsourcing: Persistent Systems Interview (Part 7)

By guest author Tony Scott

The Phases of Outsourcing: The Value of IP vs. Productization

Tony: That’s great, but isn’t a company’s core IP still really important?

Anand: To give some context here about your IP question, what I find is that with many of the small startups, you’ll find two or three founders who have some great idea and they have built a prototype. Let’s say they have some great algorithm to improve linear programming by 20%. >>>

Outsourcing: Persistent Systems Interview (Part 6)

By guest author Tony Scott

The Phases of Outsourcing: The Future of Outsourced Product Development in the Software Industry

Tony: How long do you think it will be before software product companies move to the fourth level of outsourcing, where they will be doing the equivalent of original design manufacturing? >>>

Outsourcing: Persistent Systems Interview (Part 5)

By guest author Tony Scott

The Phases of Outsourcing:  Design For Manufacturing and Original Design Manufacturing

The third phase is what we call design for manufacturing. In this phase, the people who are responsible for delivering this outsourced process say, “OK, now I know exactly how this all works together, and I can do it more efficiently than anyone else.” That’s how Flextronics grew.  They said, “We know how to build PCs, we know how to manufacture them, we know and understand all the supply chain issues, whether you are talking about microprocessor chips or cooling fans. So don’t come to us and tell us which fan to use – we’ll figure that out for you and manage the entire manufacturing process from beginning to end.” >>>

Outsourcing: Persistent Systems Interview (Part 4)

By guest author Tony Scott

The Phases of Outsourcing: Cost Arbitrage and Process Efficiency

Tony: Anand, what you are doing is primarily outsourced product development – isn’t that unique to Persistent and a couple of other companies? >>>

Outsourcing: Persistent Systems Interview (Part 3)

By guest author Tony Scott

Deep Customer Relationships

Tony: Do you typically have ongoing relationships with your customers? For example, do they tell you: “We are going be building this product, and these are the overall definitions wand features we would offer if we could, and we’d like to work with you on this over the life of the product?” >>>

Outsourcing: Persistent Systems Interview (Part 2)

By guest author Tony Scott

Outsourced Product Development

Anand: Let me fast forward to where we are today and what we do. We are positioned as leaders in the outsourced product development business. The way we define outsourced product development is, in our simplistic way, that we are the Flextronics of the software industry. What we do is work with product: We build products for companies. >>>

Outsourcing: Persistent Systems Interview (Part 1)

By guest author Tony Scott

Company Introduction and History

I recently interviewed Dr. Anand Deshpande, the founder and CEO of Persistent Systems. Persistent, based in Pune, India, has the tag line “Partners in Innovation.” Persistent believes that its outsourced software product development services allow its customers to minimize time-to-market, improve the quality of their products, reduce the risk of failure during the engineering development process, and improve the predictability and reliability of the engineering process. By outsourcing portions of the development process, Persistent allows customers to focus on their core competencies while helping them to minimize overall product engineering costs.

Persistent went public on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) and the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) on April 6, 2010. Its offering in the outsourcing world is far more advanced than what most people perceive outsourcing to be about. Persistent provides the potential for companies to focus on their real core competencies and is one of the real opportunities to create value through outsourcing high-level but non-core activities. >>>

Outsourcing: Evalueserve Interview (Part 9)

By guest author Tony Scott

India’s War For Talent

Tony: Do you see talent constraints in India creating a problem for staff outsourcing firms?

Alok: In India, I think that outsourcing in general is less likely to become saturated because of the labor cost arbitrage issue, and more because in spite of the fact that the number of colleges and number of graduates in engineering are increasing at 14% to 15% a year, that increase in the supply of talent still will not be able to handle all of the outsourcing demand, because that’s also increasing by 14% to 15% a year. That will mean that the growth of IT outsourcing for export services from India is going to be at most 14% to 15% a year. >>>