This being the first entry of mine on this blog, I am just going provide an overview of the two topics that have my mind share at this time, the first is the whole service oriented application development paradigm (including the web as a platform concept) & the second being a view of where outsourcing is going.

First let me cover the service oriented application development & the web as a platform topic.

"We want to be the air traffic controllers of electrons." -- Bob Nardelli, GE Power Systems.This is the quote of one of Welch's lieutenants, now the CEO of Home Depot. Picked it up from one of Tom Peters (www.tompeters.com) presentations. I look at Service Oriented application development as applying/implementing the principal of the above quote to the Whole Enterprise Solutions Ecology. This is particularly critical given the present business condition of environment of every changing business practices (...Change is a part of the plan -- IBM Commercial/Advertisement), geographically distributed & outsourced environment.

Service oriented Systems I believe are one part of the puzzle, the other part which I don't think a lot of us have got their heads around, is the whole concept of using the web as a platform, it is presently being looked at a purely customer end/connection/experience play but I believe that there is more to it from the enterprise point of view. A recent conference Web 2.0 conducted by Tim Oriely has some key insights into this area. I will delve more into the details as we go along.
Second, Outsourcing"Don't own nothin' if you can help it. If you can, rent your shoes." F.G.As a concept it has been hacked/dissected to great depth, but I don't think we have unlocked its complete/true potential, that is going to be a continuous process. There are some outsourcing models that are in place & working, but are these the best? Well recent announcements / activities have me thinking a lot about this space.

"What is"...has become "What was"....Everything is getting changed, Captive Outsourced units don't seem to be the way of the future(GE sold off its captive unit in India ), Location..."Forget India, Let's Go to Bulgaria" ---Headline, BW/03.04, re SAP, BMW, Siemens et al. "near-shoring", Delivery/output....Well some organization are shutting off outsourcing deals, as they are not meeting the expectations.... JP Morgan Chase, the company ended a $5 billion outsourcing contract that had failed to produce, Players! Application Outsourcing at the moment is a big ticket market place, 66% of the deals are 1 billion US $ & above and covered by IBM, EDS & Accenture. Moving forward how is this landscape going to look are the big deals going to get broken down to smaller deals are distributed to multiple vendors.....Who are the players?...... Where is the future on this?

Prashanth Rai