Cloud Market to Reach $121 Billion in 2015

According to research data, the cloud services market has already surpassed $37.8 billion and is continuing to grow towards $121.1 billion in 2015.

The continual growth of the cloud market is absolute related to the explosive development of “end products”. It is expected that due to universal mobile device usage, the number of total internet users will increase to 10 billion in only another 10 years. With industry needs and each national government’s promotion, it can be said that cloud computing has truly entered its stage of growth.

IDC’s recent report further reaffirms the growth in the virtualization space. As per IDC, with shipments of virtualized servers growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14% from 2009 to 2014, it is expected that the robust growth in server virtualization will continue through 2014 as datacenter adoption is increasingly considered mainstream in mature economies and as organizations in emerging regions look for datacenter efficiencies. With datacenter consolidation, along with the rise of cloud computing, virtualization and virtual desktop infrastructure, more and more computing power and data itself are moving into virtual world.

The prospects of the cloud market are looking promising, attracting investment from many different sources, so at this time, everyone can acknowledge that using cloud computing will allow data transmission to become quicker and more easily managed.

Source: Global Services

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IT Outsourcing in Contemporary Russia

The current state of IT and outsourcing industry in Russia is on the uprise. Just consider the following fact: the average rate of growth of Russia's economy is significantly lower than the rate of growth of IT.

The financial crisis, which occurred over two years ago, forced clients to reconsider their attitude to "the impossibility of outsourcing critical functions of IT". Most businesses took another look at the age-old practice of outsourcing and had to acknowledge that the last decade significantly changed the IT industry. The heads of IT departments stopped fearing losing company value by outsourcing some functions. Outsourcing has progressed to a level that would have been reached otherwise in three to five years, had the financial crisis not occurred.

The main difference between Russian and Western IT outsourcing remains in the absence of mutual trust between the outsourcer and the consumer in Russia. Furthermore, the success of the Western service provider is based on the high level of innovations and the originality of the service. Lately the most popular topics for discussion have been cloud technologies and rendering services according to principles SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service). These new approaches, on one hand, will bring a new wave of interest from a growing number of clients, and on the other — a wide range of offers from outsourcing companies. Without a doubt, there will be unique cases in working with each individual model, and every implementation would have to take into account all particular features of the client: specifics of the business, level of infrastructure and quality of personnel. But the commonality of all these cases will be the increase in mutual trust and responsibility of the outsourcing company for the result of the service project.

Today more than a half of clients feel that they must switch to the outsourcing model in the nearest future, and more than one-third already have some level of service agreements and are planning to expand them by implementing new types of services in software development, testing, and maintenance and support. Russia is wide open to all new opportunities in outsourcing.

Source: The Moscow Times

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Excellent NearShoring Choice – Ukraine

The long-established popular offshoring location India is steadily yielding to more attractive NearShore hubs like Russia and Ukraine. Why is NearShoring becoming a preferred choice of outsourcing customers? Why does Central and Eastern Europe lure more IT projects and thrive on the global arena?

In our today’s article we’ll take a good look at Ukraine and scrutinize its outsourcing potential as an advantageous NearShoring option.

First and foremost, in terms of the growing volume of offshore software development, Ukraine’s outsourcing potential is rooted in its deep skilled talent pool. Due to its technical expertise, the country gets a serious competitive advantage on the global arena attracting more mission-critical software implementation projects and complex consulting engagements. Figures from the Ukrainian Hi-Tech Initiative, the country's outsourcing software development alliance, reveal Ukraine's outsourcing industry is estimated to have grown by 20% in 2010.

However, growing technical expertise and demand for developers has led to increasing labor costs. According to the European Business Association (EBA), the monthly earnings of IT specialists in Ukraine have risen by $300 to $1,500 since 2010. In 2005, a monthly pay was just $500. Although even considering the significant pay rise, Ukraine still remains far cheaper than most countries in Western Europe. The country's biggest asset remains in its educated young people, who are not easy to find elsewhere even for real big money. "Many speak English and are internet literate. Companies employ these youngsters, and that's why they thrive," noted Michael Borg-Hansen, who has worked as Danish Ambassador in Ukraine since 2009. "You have to be really resilient in business to make it here, but it's the same case in a lot of emerging economies."

Source: ComputerWeekly

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Collaborative Sourcing As a New Transformational Approach

Is outsourcing outdated? Yes, collaborative sourcing is currently on the rise.

Application collaborative sourcing is a delivery framework that provides ongoing development and maintenance of an enterprise's full application portfolio. The framework model provides a platform to drive innovation and focuses on time-to-value while introducing working collaborative practices to get critical business functionality into production at a fast rate.

A core theme of collaborative sourcing is improving the business's capability to compete on time. The collaborative sourcing argument is that if we wish to accelerate time-to-value, we need to measure factors of time at the lowest levels of granularity possible.

Collaborative sourcing accelerates time-to-value. Through a set of Web 2.0 technologies and an integrated set of processes, collaborative sourcing focuses on cycle time (elapsed time) and speed (hours vs estimate) as the principal metrics for measuring performance.

Staff behaviors are directed toward competitive, time-based outcomes when not only development methods, but also the talent model and recognition systems, are calibrated on time-based measures.

Collaborative sourcing is a true transformational approach to an enterprise's applications development and maintenance strategy. In addition to providing the mechanism to realize the benefits of global delivery and continue significant cost reductions, collaborative sourcing creates the engine to accelerate time-to-value. Rather than focusing almost exclusively on cost takeout, collaborative sourcing refocuses a CIO's capabilities and resources toward adding value to the business through accelerated time-to-value and outcomes-based measurement processes.

Source: Global Services

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