Even offshore outsourced at enterprise software oligopolists getting ethered

Even the enterprise software oligopolists SAP & Oracle are laying off workers at their offshore outsourced Indian offices.

Supposedly some of this is India-specific sales, which I could understand more.

But the majority of these Indian offices are working on offshored work in product dev, consulting, internal G&A tasks such as Finance/Accounting, etc, for a rich country end customer, especially the US.

Either overall global employment in enterprise application software is in a bubble, or SAP or Oracle are just too damn greedy. Perhaps the CXOs feel that to maintain their multimillion pay packages, they need to eliminate even those "greedy" $10-25K (not sure on actual amount, just know it's much lower than the US which motivated the offshoring) salaried Indian employees doing real customer work.

If the oligopolist offshored knowledge workers getting eliminated like this, what does this say for US workers at non-oligopolist vendors? "Shhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid" (c) The Wire's MD State Senator Clay Davis.

I hope open source takes over the enterprise app software business, indy or small business software engineers, project consultants, etc have a chance at decent careers, or even self-employment.

Those that don't actually help the end customer, brutal arrogant oligopolist, parasite CXOs like Larry Ellison or Safra Catz can eat an infinite johns sandwich. I'm sure the Bangalore staff are saying similar things in Hindi right about now.

opinion: Blame CIOs for the IT skills shortage

opinion Blame CIOs for the IT skills shortage

opinion on future software industry

Software founder/exec Romesh Wadhwani of Aspect Dev/i2 & other vendors gives opinion on future of the software industry.

most consultants are mere order fulfillment?

Vinnie pointed out this Brian Sommer opinion stating that most business & IT consultants are not true consultants, instead they are order fulfillment folks delivering tasks.

Interesting perspective, my take is that there's a spectrum between consultant status & order fulfillment status. At least in the supply chain software implementation area, there is usually some specific nature of the client's business requirements, which requires some creative thinking by the project team. If it was pure order fulfillment, more of the project could be automated in software, or delivered in manuals that a trained client person could do themselves. I can't speak for other business app software areas like ERP or CRM, they might be more commodity in nature.

Aras, open source PLM app vendor

This private Boston software company Aras, supposedly was an existing proprietary PLM app vendor with real existing customers, that changed to an free open source model, meaning the software license cost is free for new customers. Existing customers get free maintenance for a certain time frame.

The article claim Aras now makes its revenue from annual maintenance fees.

It said the app is only available on Microsoft (MS) infrastructure (Windows OS & SQL Server database). Since MS is so huge, I wouldn't be surprised if Aras gets some corporate welfare subsidies from MS, if nothing else for MS to point out a successful example of their involvement of open source.

Obviously it would be better if Aras also supported a LAMP open source infrastructure software stack, but this is still a good step IMHO.

I think this trend for open source business app software would be good for customers, and for the "real work" departments of a software vendor (software development, consulting/implementation, customer support, etc. Too much cost, time, & effort is wasted in an app software sales cycle.

enterprise software/supply chain management blogs

These blogs have good articles on enterprise software & supply chain management.

It will be interesting to see if the trend of enterprise software bloggers, makes less relevant the "software industry analyst" industry of companies like AMR Research & Forrester.

Deal Architect/Vinnie Mirchandani
The Enterprise System Spectator/Frank Scavo

Boardwalk Tech

This software vendor Boardwalk Tech, has an application that takes an existing business process that is existing user Excel spreadsheets, & makes the process like an enterprise software implementation. The users still use Excel as their GUI, but there is tracking of changes made to the Excel cell level.

This sounds interesting, since Excel is so prevalent by all "knowledge workers" for so many analysis projects.

Thingamy

Thingamy is a software app, where supposedly 1 can quickly define a business process in the GUI, not needing custom software engineering, or even configuration of text files/DB/etc. Instead of a traditional relational DB, it uses an in-memory object-oriented DB.

Potentially this is as replacement for ERP, at least for a specific key unique process a business might have. I assume Thigamy currently is more implementable in a small business.

Not sure if Thigamy is open source or not. I didn't see a download link to the software on the site.

I will file this on the proverbial "watch list".