Three conversations with clients in the past few days:
a) When will offerings like amazon's new Compute Cloud be viable for corporate versus free- agent developer usage?
b) So SaaS pricing includes hosting, bug fixes, tuning, upgrades - and the application licensing? Can we terminate our current infrastructure and application maintenance outsourcing and move to a SaaS vendor?
c) Can you find us an alternative vendor which does away with time zone, travel and communication issues with our current one?
Against this background, I see Brian Sommer recommend the article How to be an Outsourcing Virtuoso by 2 Booz Allen consultants.
It is well written, but I cannot help but think it presents such a placid, even dated, view of the outsourcing market.
Just under the surface there are so many other evolutions going on:
Cannibalized application hosting and maintenance a la SaaS vendors
Hardware as a service by vendors like Sun and amazon
Beyond single country delivery to multi-country - truly "Global" delivery models
Emergence of near shore and rural delivery centers as alternatives to long distance delivery from India, China, Philippines.
Understanding of how to leverage developer "communities" - amazon, SAP's SDN
The short putt from SaaS to BPO
Re-engineering of the outsourcing supply chain
The "best practices" the Booz Allen article describes are a helpful catalog. But the outsourcing "virtuosos" I know are looking way beyond them.
