Samsung to Offer Mobile Access to Oracle, Other Software

Samsung has developed a mobile CRM (customer relationship management) service, based on Oracle products, that it partially hosts from a data center in New Jersey.

It showed off the new service during CTIA in San Diego, but doesn't plan to officially announce it until Oracle Openworld next week.

While Oracle already offers a very basic version of its CRM system for mobile phones, Samsung's has many more features, said Jae Shin, senior director of mobile services for Samsung.

For instance, Oracle's mobile offering displays connections between customers in a spreadsheet. But Samsung has developed a hub-and-spoke graphic that shows users at a glance which customers know each other.

Sales people who use the software can click on a customer name in their contact list and find a record of historical contact with the customer.

Read More Article...

Offshore software outsourcing. why China and why now?

While many of Britain’s software organisations may now be grappling with concerns over a cooling economic climate, rising operational costs and ongoing skills resourcing pinch-points, the moment may present a great opportunity for China’s emerging software development outsourcing industry to make its presence felt.

Recessions may not be bad news for everyone. Whilst many of Britain’s software organisations may now be grappling with concerns over a cooling economic climate, rising operational costs and ongoing skills resourcing pinch-points, the moment may present a great opportunity for China’s emerging software development outsourcing industry to make its presence felt, challenging the Indian value proposition that has been the dominant port of call for those considering an offshore strategy. All of which could give software development firms and IT management departments pause for thought.

To China watchers, this is not a surprise. The country’s return to the front of the world’s stage by successfully hosting the 29th Olympiad was actually just the most visible public face of what has, behind the scenes, been a major outward facing strategy for the nation’s domestic industries. Enjoying full support from national and provincial governments determined to move up the products and services value chain, China’s commercial and technology growth objectives for the next decade or more are anchored on accelerating beyond being the world’s manufacturing assembly hub, to becoming instead a key player in the 21st century’s knowledge economy. In this overall picture, the software product and services sector can be seen as a linchpin in helping to achieve these goals, through the development of high technology services, product oriented research and export driven international reach.

Read more Article...

Managing success in offshore software development

A framework for reclaiming visibility and control swapping-offshore development has been embraced by the vast majority of commercial software vendors and enterprise application development groups. Why? Lets find out..

ACCORDING TO a recent study by Duke University and Booz Allen Hamilton, high-end functions like software development are rapidly gaining acceptance as off shore candidates. And as the pattern of off shoring migrates from low-end to high-end work, the challenges faced by the management have moved from dealing with political backlash to more operational issues like retaining managerial control and gaining operational efficiency. As application development becomes increasingly dispersed, those running these projects face a new twist to the age-old challenge of managing distributed software projects. Traditional team management techniques, like scorecards and site meetings, are ineffective and impossible to scale in a world where teams span vast physical, temporal, cultural, and organisational barriers. Managers are finding it increasingly hard to get the facts needed to build a reliable picture of projects and to make informed decisions. Building software in a flat world, characterises this loss of control as a major obstacle to working in a globally distributed environment. I suggest that this problem is experienced by 35 per cent of organisations engaged in off shoring today.

Read More Article...

Best of open-source in software development

The wealth of open-source software development goodies is heaven for the developer community, but it's hell on an awards committee. Considering integrated development environments (IDE), debuggers, defect trackers, code coverage tools, unit testers, load testers, and so on, we could have come up with more awards here than the rest of the 2007 InfoWorld Bossie Awards combined. Then there were paths that could only lead to trouble. Could we really choose a best language? Or a best development platform? Could we pick Python over Perl, or Rails over Mono?

Read More Article...

Offshore Software Development: How to Select Projects That Will Succeed

One of the key decisions a company needs to make in offshoring software development is which projects to offshore. You cannot simply offshore “maintenance” projects, because your staff in the U.S. wants to work on new product development. This issue must be carefully thought through and here are time tested and proven guidelines:

1. Business objective: It may sound simple but make sure you clearly define your objectives for offshore outsourcing. Are you going offshore for cost only, for cost and skills, do you wish to use local expertise to develop or customize products for that part of the world? Each of these can lead you to a different list of potential projects.
   
2. Adequate resource pool offshore: This issue is not always obvious; but depending on the technologies you employ, you need to ascertain if there is a large enough resource pool. Competition for the right resources in countries like India is intense; if you are in a narrow niche and you need to invest significant training dollars to get the staff up to speed, you need to think through how you can retain your staff. Industry has experienced many instances where one company invested in training key staff, only to find that 6 months later a competitor offered enough incentives for the recently trained staff to leave the first company. A mid-sized company who experienced this is evaluating if they should bring the project back to U.S.
   
3. ROI: A small software company recently considered offshoring; the proposal was to offshore the equivalent of four to six developers. The financial analysis indicated that at this level, the overhead needed to establish and manage an offshore effort was significant and the cost savings after considering all associated costs didn’t exist. The company decided against outsourcing. This example points to another criterion for determining whether a project makes sense for offshore -- return on investment. After all, one of the most common reasons for offshoring is to reduce cost.
   
4. Deliverables and level of interface with the U.S. team: Can you define clearly what the offshore team needs to do? The more you can do this, the better your chances of success. What is the level of interface? How much interaction does the offshore team need to do with the U.S. team? If you need to provide ongoing (read: some times daily) management guidance, it will take significant management effort make it successful or worse yet, it may not succeed at all.
   
5. Specialized equipment or tools: If your development environment involves specialized tools and equipment, it can impact financial feasibility and schedules; you need to think through the time it will take to create the necessary environment offshore.
   
6. Transfer of Information and Training: How long does it take, at what cost and whether you have personnel available to devote to this, in addition to doing their own current tasks?
   
7. Cultural fit (Contextual knowledge necessary); is it possible to train offshore personnel within a reasonable time frame? For example, projects that deal with user interfaces are harder to transfer because of the need to understand the cultural issues in the U.S.
   
8. Attracting and retaining offshore talent: If you are doing new development or you are in a hot technology area, this will work in your favour. If you are considering dated or proprietary technology with limited market appeal and/or sustaining effort, this will work against you.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/outsourcing-articles/offshore-software-development-how-to-select-projects-that-will-succeed-207696.html

About the Author:
Do you want to learn more about key ingredients for global outsourcing success?
http://www.offshoringsuccess.com/web_log.php
M. M. “Sath” Sathyanarayan was executive at a Fortune 500 corporation and CEO of a startup; now a consultant, author and trainer, he has published a book and dozens of articles on global outsourcing.

How To Save Money With Software Development Offshore

As the owner of your own business, there will definitely come a time when you need some software to keep your company growing but you are unable to find a supplier for the program you need. Maybe the program does not exist yet, or perhaps the programs you have tried have all failed to live up to the hype. Whatever the reason, there is simply no need to suffer at the whim of poorly designed software for your business when you can always have another programmer create a personalized piece of software especially for your business. And there is no better way to get the program you want for an exceptionally low price than by having a software development offshore firm do the work for you.

Outsourcing software development offshore has almost become a way of life for many companies around America. Let's face it, India and China are chock full of programmers who are just as capable as their American counterparts - and they charge far less for their products than just about anyone here in this country. So, if you are looking for a great deal on your software products, you should consider turning your attention to what is going on overseas, as you may be extremely surprised by what the Asiatic competition can do for you.

Along with the lower price tag for development, you may find that the differences in culture actually work to your advantage. Unencumbered by ideas that programmers in the United States may hold based on societal norms, persons who are used to a different way of looking at things will of necessity bring a different perspective to the process of software development. What this means for you is the potential to be the first one on the block to have a software package that does things in a new and interesting way.

Even if you own your own software development company, there is simply no reason for you to hire a slew of expensive American programmers to do a lot of the mindless programming work for you. Instead, consider outsourcing some of the tedious programming to companies overseas. You have your in house programmers do all of the conceptualizing and planning for the software. They draft up a few flow charts and code templates and then you branch out to Asia for all of the mind numbing work, freeing your in house staff to do more planning for future software releases. It is a win, win situation with software development offshore, allowing your company to reap higher profits in no time.

Source : http://www.articleblotter.com/

Mayoor Patel is the writer for the website software-development.wares-are.us. Please visit for information on all things concerned with Software Development Offshore

Offshore Software Development: Get high return on investment

In this twenty-first century, with the advancement in technology, as new standards are emerging, competition is also equally increasing. And this is making business owners - whether their businesses are large or small- to recognize the strength of changes around them, and adapt to changes in the marketplace. In order to keep themselves at par with the marketplace and get competitive advantage, business owners are now concentrating more on their core activities to get high return on investment.

This thought has made business entrepreneurs to outsource their other services. One of them is Software development service which is now leading the chart among other offshore services. Despite being a complex process, still software development is rapidly gaining favor as an offshore contender because it is a cost effective alternative to developing software onshore. The reason of preference gained by offshore development service is their huge advantages. Like, the companies which are using this service have a huge option of choosing service providers from a wide range of global expertise spread out across the globe where they can get the work done at lower costs by saving out on expensive programs and equipment required for the completion of a particular task. In this way, they can control their IT budget and resources as projects will be taken care off by the offshore development center of the offshore service provider.

And one of the major advantages of using offshore development services is that offshore development companies are backed by a solid team of programmers and developers who are expert in their field. And there is no need to worry about hiring new employees for your software development. As the team is highly focused on software development, you will get your work done in more professional and efficient way. Moreover, this enable you to get your job done at a faster rate, thus will help you to achieve your business goals quickly. And another thing you don’t need to worry is the maintenance services. Now, offshore companies are providing post maintenance services to prove their efficiency and build sustainable relationships with their clients and also technical support with great interest which attracts outsourcers to avail rich development services from them.

If we talk about offshore development center, India has become the leader in offshore service providers and India owns around 80 percent of this market due to a highly trained and professional man power, low labor costs, admiration for software development disciplines and a great English language skills. And if you want to get around-the-clock productivity and profits, then you should outsource your software projects to countries like India.

Michael Lucas is the pioneer author and like to share his experience and ideas with others.If you want any information about offshore development take the help of offshore outsourcing company india or vist: www.vsworx.com/

Source : http://www.articleblotter.com/

Offshore Software Development : How to Select Projects That Will Succeed

One of the key decisions a company needs to make in off-shoring software development is which projects to offshore. You cannot simply offshore “maintenance” projects, because your staff in the U.S. wants to work on new product development. This issue must be carefully thought through and here are time tested and proven guidelines:

1. Business objective : It may sound simple but make sure you clearly define your objectives for offshore outsourcing. Are you going offshore for cost only, for cost and skills, do you wish to use local expertise to develop or customize products for that part of the world? Each of these can lead you to a different list of potential projects.
2. Adequate resource pool offshore : This issue is not always obvious; but depending on the technologies you employ, you need to ascertain if there is a large enough resource pool. Competition for the right resources in countries like India is intense; if you are in a narrow niche and you need to invest significant training dollars to get the staff up to speed, you need to think through how you can retain your staff. Industry has experienced many instances where one company invested in training key staff, only to find that 6 months later a competitor offered enough incentives for the recently trained staff to leave the first company. A mid-sized company who experienced this is evaluating if they should bring the project back to U.S.
3. ROI: A small software company recently considered off-shoring; the proposal was to offshore the equivalent of four to six developers. The financial analysis indicated that at this level, the overhead needed to establish and manage an offshore effort was significant and the cost savings after considering all associated costs didn’t exist. The company decided against outsourcing. This example points to another criterion for determining whether a project makes sense for offshore -- return on investment. After all, one of the most common reasons for off-shoring is to reduce cost.
4. Deliverables and level of interface with the U.S. team: Can you define clearly what the offshore team needs to do? The more you can do this, the better your chances of success. What is the level of interface? How much interaction does the offshore team need to do with the U.S. team? If you need to provide ongoing (read: some times daily) management guidance, it will take significant management effort make it successful or worse yet, it may not succeed at all.
5. Specialized equipment or tools: If your development environment involves specialized tools and equipment, it can impact financial feasibility and schedules; you need to think through the time it will take to create the necessary environment offshore.
6. Transfer of Information and Training: How long does it take, at what cost and whether you have personnel available to devote to this, in addition to doing their own current tasks?
7. Cultural fit (Contextual knowledge necessary); is it possible to train offshore personnel within a reasonable time frame? For example, projects that deal with user interfaces are harder to transfer because of the need to understand the cultural issues in the U.S.
8. Attracting and retaining offshore talent: If you are doing new development or you are in a hot technology area, this will work in your favour. If you are considering dated or proprietary technology with limited market appeal and/or sustaining effort, this will work against you.

M. M. “Sath” Sathyanarayan is President of Global Development Consulting, Inc., an offshore advisory firm. Sath is a pioneer and an internationally recognized expert on offshore outsourcing; he led HP/Tandem’s entry into offshore outsourcing beginning in early 90s, was CEO of 24by7 Corporation and now consultant, author and trainer. For a free preview of his book, “Offshore Development and Technical Support: Proven Strategies and Tactics for Success”, click here: http://www.offshoringsuccess.com/guestregister.php/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mandli_Sathyanarayan/

Offshore Software Development

Our objective is to keep you informed about the topics related to the offshore outsourcing especially in the area of Software Development. We will discuss the Risks, Best Practices, Tips and Techniques and other topics related to offshore software outsourcing.

It is a well known fact that the offshore outsourcing (or any type of outsourcing for that matter) carries known and unknown risks. The important thing is to find out if your offshore outsourcing provider is aware of these risks and has a plan to either mitigate it or eliminate it altogether.

The top 5 risks of offshore outsourcing are as follows:

• Requirement (Mis)understanding
• Quality Risks
• Data Security
• Process Discipline (CMM)
• Project Timeline
• Requirement (Mis)understanding

Many times it happens that the requirements get written in a hurry to get the project started as soon as possible. This is okay if the project is being done inhouse. However if it being outsourced, it becomes a risk. If the specifications are not written properly or are incomplete or do not have enough details, the project will have problems on various fronts such as Project Understanding -
what needs to be done and delivered, Project Planning - putting together firm dates for delivery, Change Controls - lots of change control will be generated later on in the project life cycle, which could obviously delay the project as well as increase the cost.Per the study conducted by Software Engineering Institute, not enough understanding or the clarity around the customer requirements is one of the top reasons on why software projects fail or get delayed.

In order to mitigate this risk, make sure that your provider has gone through the requirement understanding phase before starting the coding phase. The requirement understanding phase should have multiple rounds of discussion with all the parties involved to fully understand and document their requirements in the Software Specification Documents. This phase is independent of technology selected for the project. For the web based projects, the provider should also prepare the HTML mock-ups which is an excellent way to capture the application flow. [These mock-ups should get reused during the coding phase for embedding the application
method calls.

The first phase of any software development project must be the Requirements Development. The objective of the Requirements Development phase is to gather the needs of the customer and translate that into requirements specification of what the system must do. Requirements Development consists of three related activities:

Analyzing Requirements, which is about determining the acceptability, implement ability, and testability.

Inspecting Requirements, which is accomplished by discussing the proposed requirement in detail. The goal is to identify the issues and errors related to the requirements ambiguities or discrepancies.

Gathering User Requirements, which is accomplished by interviewing the potential users about the system they want, building the interactive prototypes, writing he Requirement Specification documents.

The deliverable from this phase is a detailed requirements document which should get jointly reviewed and signed off. www.hanusoftware.com/

Source: http://www.articlealley.com/article_158924_11.html/

Outsourcing Software Development To India

The advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing software development to India.

Advantages in Outsourcing

Primarily it is cost. The cost of resources are up to 30% of an IT resource in the US or Europe, and probably better qualified. The salary of a developer is a mere $9000 per year. The resources that you are using are likely to incur lower expenses and promise to be more flexible. There are no employment issues. Most Indian employees will be happy to fly economy class and do not demand business hotels. Resourcing is not a problem with 70,000 IT professionals graduating in 2001.

Disadvantages in Outsourcing

Many outsourcing business cases are drawn up on the understanding that the development will be done off site, maximising cost savings. However, those that have done it in practice have ended up onsite. This is due to business understanding; it becomes important to be in the same room as your users. This is particularly the case with web development, where some western businesses have found the Indian view of colour co-ordination somewhat lurid.

There are also significant cultural differences that have to be appreciated. In Indian culture, there is a great deal of respect shown to your manager and their word is rarely questioned, certainly not in public. Communication is much more formal, people call each other by their surnames and call their managers "sir". Many managers have also witnessed an unwillingness to admit mistakes or a lack of understanding amongst Indian workers. All managers interviewed have also found out the hard way that Indians will follow written instructions to the letter rather than seeking clarification or by using common sense. An example where a specification asked for too many buttons to fit on one screen - rather than reduce the size of the buttons, the developers created a second menu screen with a solitary button on it.

Risks in Outsourcing

1. Unproven on Large Scales

It is apparent that the industry is still young and largely unproven. There are, however, many success stories which are fuelling the fire. It is important for business managers to realise that there will not be any perceivable benefit for at least two years. Overall costs will increase during this time as you simultaneously retain local staff while the Indian resources come up-to-speed.

2. Work Permits

Part of the outsourcing arrangements are to have some of the team come and work in the customer's premises for a few months, most arrangements stipulate that there are resources stationed onsite liasing with colleagues abroad. It will be difficult for outsourcing companies to offer onsite resources and retain savings. This could severely disrupt the outsourcing arrangements. Check your contracts!

3. Stability of the Offshore Countries

Many of my work colleagues are predicting the worsening of relationships between India and Pakistan. Fearing the worst, a nuclear war would have a severe impact on any economic activity in India, in spite of the centres being far away from the disputed Kashmir region. While it is hoped that conflicts such as this will never arise, India is still relatively unstable. The riots in Chennai two years ago caused many lost days of development time and forced several firms to up and move from the region.

Companies must ensure that the outsourcing companies have disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place, or in the worst case should prepare for the eventuality of non-availability of their outsourcing partners.

About the Author:

For further information on software outsourcing, offshore outsourcing and offshore software development, http://www.a1technology.com/ .

Article Source: www.iSnare.com/