AT&T follows Dell in shutting down its call centers in India

Dell’s decision on shutting down one of its large Indian operations seems to have given others the courage to follow suit… AT&T has decided to bring back jobs to the US as well, citing several reasons, such as being able to get the American worker unions to reduce their wages…which means the US workers arent going to sit around anymore and see their jobs go away to India. Apple has also decided NOT to open its call center in India and keep operations in the US.

Again, this is a chance to make these companies look elsewhere, (ie towards us…) above all our challenge would be to maintain service quality, something you cannot put a price tag on. The indian IT industry will recover from such small loses of business, but they have the same problem we might if we arent careful…maintaining service quality. Full article below :

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060925-7826.html

Thanks to Imran for the link! keep em coming!

craigslist comes to Pakistan!

craigslist, a very popular and novel way to buy and sell now has a pakistan sub-site. Not much there yet but alot more should follow. This now would be on my list of pakistani sites i hit like beliscity.com,etc

Thanks to Sameer for sending me the link!

http://pakistan.craigslist.org/about/cities.html

Pasha ICT Awards 2006

I personally missed this event..regretably.. however, here is a list of the winners and runners up

http://www.pasha.org.pk/html_files/newsroom_news67.html

Do note that some companies did not take part (notice the absence of LMKR, Five rivers, Mentor graphics, etc) , and some were judges. Most companies are headquartered in Karachi, where the awards were held…i wonder if there was an effort to get more companies from Lahore and ISB to participate. However, while mostly it seemed to be a fair award ceremony, I cant help but think whether there was an effort to please everyone…I mean who is Hypass and inquire? i guess i’ll learn more about these new (if they are) companies, but looks like if you didnt win, you definetly got something for trying! (the Merit Award). Though not to be too critical..i have heard rave reviews of the event, so im giving credit where its due..keep it up PASHA and all the winners/merit award winners!

Dell abandons Indian outsourcing project

On ZD net today…Dell has admitted it made a mistake by taking its business to India. More evidence for us that India aint all that its hyped up to be. As a matter of fact, from what I read in this article, it was downright a sad story for Dell. Cracks in the shell like this are good opportunities for us to break into the US outsourcing market in a big way. Firms like Avanza, Five Rivers, Techlogix, TRG,etc offer a real alternative to India and Israel, at a better cost and higher quality in some cases….not to discredit India, they are doing great work…but there is a limit to the amount of business an industry can manage at a given time..sooner or later it will spill into other countries…everyone in the West is looking to outsource…go and get your share of the new economy now!!!!

Read the full article here:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/employment/0,39020648,39150648,00.htm

Thanks to my friend Mubin for forwarding the article! keep em coming man!

Have you noticed..I didnt write about ITCN?!

yup! i didnt! why? because its a useless useless useless event! give that money to PASHA instead to hold events, or ask Pegasus to come up with new ideas to revitalize this event.

This year, it was nothing more than a freebie giveaway marketing event, not a real showcase of the technology work being done in the country. This should be evident from major players like IBM , Inbox, etc deciding not to take part in the exhibition, and I agree with that. One stall costs an average of 15,000 dollars US, and that money is better spent on direct marketing with clients. Might make sense for consumer items, but the majority of our technology work is more focused in the B2B and government to government business areas, unless ofcourse, if you’re a cell phone or cell service provider, but then you arent a technology company, so what are you doing there anyway!!! wait, i know…giving out freebies and marketing your brand, not showcasing technology!

ITCN has degenerated into one huge USELESS event! convince me otherwise, or atleast try…

(please please try, i want to have a useless argument on this…just kidding )

The Ugly truth about the connectivity boom?

Everyone’s whose anyone in the top layer – networking/connectivity provider market, ie Wateen, Mobilink, Multinet,etc nowadays is trying to get into the business that is so far covered only by PTCL :Offering their own infrastructure (like Wateen’s Moto4 wimax network in progress) to transport the country’s voice,video and data to and fro.

An interesting article details the nasty end of this boom, ie high debt, and too much competition for a decent ROI on these investments which means out of the 4 or so players probably 2 will fail. I have my money on Mobilink succeeding though..since its an open secret that they have ooooodles of cash ready to throw at large projects such as these and have enough time to sit back and wait for the ROI to come in…just like what they did with their cellular network service, which is one of Orascom’s largest and most profitable.

Read the article here:

http://www.pakistanlink.com/Headlines/Sep06/19/11.htm

And thanks again to Osama for forwarding it to me!

Out till Wednesday

Dear Readers I will be out of action will Wednesday, but as soon as I get back I’ll be writing about the PASHA ICT Awards 2006, and about the latest on amana.com , our version of Paypal! so stay tuned…

Tripleplay bowled out?

The very ambitious initiative taken by PTCL..dubbed as the Tripleplay project, according to several sources has been shelved. This happened awhile ago but I did not add it till I got a few more confirmations from sources in the Industry. Tripleplay envisioned giving its users broadband internet, cable TV and phone access all through the standard copper phone line. This would essentially have been DSL technology delivering IP TV, voIP telephony and standard internet access. This ofcourse leaves other providers like WorldCall and Wateen to move forward with their plans for similar systems based on Optic fiber and WiMAX respectively without fighting the strongest monopoly in the country.

Personally, I think its the right thing to do. Dump the copper cable, really. Its too old and has too many limits on it as a medium, and too many issues. Suppose I had tripleplay. then i would have to pay my lineman not to only fix my phone faster, but my cable tv and internet too!!! (I dont pay any lineman, but you get what i mean)

ABN’s CRM-ATM integration

ABM Amro Bank in pakistan is connecting its ATMs directly into its’ CRM system. An innovative idea, as a customer you will get direct marketing relevant to you right on the ATM screen while you do your transaction. It would be a good idea to also record in the CRM system the customer’s ATM usage experience. The interesting thing is, i havent seen any other bank connect IT systems and delivery channels this way. well, for that matter, most local firms do not grasp the importance of CRM system or of simple SFA (sales force automation) systems Kudos to ABN!

On another note, I am down with the Flu and will return to blogging by this weekend.

And lastly, if you bank with Bank Al Habib, I suggest you switch before you arent able to access your accounts at all. their ATMS are usually down, and their interconnection with 1-link ATMs has been down for 2-3 days, overall service has gone from bad to worse to unavailable,hence I am switching off them this week. Will probably go with Metropolitan or UBL.

SAAS (Software-as-a-service) : Pakistan’s chance to catch up?

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, there was this dude who said that there was no way that we could have more than a few hundred phones operating at any given time across the world. Why? because we wont have enough operators to patch calls through! The same prediction was made for computers from someone in (gasp!) IBM. This ofcourse, was a long time ago.

Just like the complexity the phone system shifted into the network, this now too is happening to software. Referring to Shoaib Abbasi’s talk on Software-as-a-service at a PASHA event held recently, enterprise software is going the way of the consumer Internet. With technologies like web2.0, Ajax and broadband becoming commonplace, most websites now are nearly as functional as a rich client, and in most of the cases a viable alternative to a executable file on your desktop. The complexity has shifted into the network, most directly, into the web application.

So, this opens up a large, potentially great opportunity for us here in Pakistan. You can be a group of three programmers sitting in karachi and you can sell your web application to Yahoo for , say, 6 million dollars. No joke. Oddpost.com was a mail service with an outlook-style interface started by 3 out of work developers in the bay area about 3 years ago. Last year they sold their company to Yahoo! for 27 million dollars. Has anyone noticed now the latest version of Hotmail looks like Outlook? Yahoo’s buyout of Oddpost kick started the Windows guys to keep up….Also last year, Bazee.com, the “indian” ebay was bought by Ebay for 50 million dollars.

There is a large shift right now towards web applications and AJAX based front-ends. If you have the right application, (like Salesforce.com did by taking on siebel and netsuite.com does by taking on the ERPs of the world) you can potentially land yourself right into the middle of Silicon Valley dreamland. Today’s killer-app is web based, along with the LAMP/WAMP stack, and extreme programming methods (which work well for medium sized web-apps), the SDLC is a much more faster and brutal beast to tame, with timelines for software development dropping from years into months. Which means the barrier to entry into the enterprise app space in mature markets just came down a few notches…

Which means, we have a potential 2 year window to break back into the Silicon Valley Club by pursuing innovation and ideas and by building frameworks and applications that move essential functions into web based interfaces running in browsers. In the end its not just the ideas but also the ability to execute them that makes individuals and companies epic.

Time and opinion are not on our side, but that hasnt stopped us as an industry from being successful before. For the most part, we have lost the IT outsourcing race to Israel and India. The race to move applications into webspace and off the desktop is on. Lets not miss the chance to win this one.