This morning’s Ziff Davis Webcast, “Managing Insourced, Outsourced, and Disperse Development Teams,” was a truly mixed bag — full of 30,000-foot proclamations and software product specifications.
Jim Duggan, Research VP, Gartner Research, provided high level findings that quantify how much you can expect to outsource for a million-dollar application development project — using slides that other Gartner folks have shared considerably in other presentations over the last three months and that I’ve covered here. And Randy Guck, Chief Scientist, Borland Software Corp., discussed the wonders of smart collaboration — especially using Borland products to accomplish it.
Ah, well. It wasn’t a total waste. You never know when you’re tuning into a Webcast whether there will be a jewel at the very end that you should stay tuned in for. Such was the case for me. And it came in the form of an anonymous case studies shared by Borland.
I sometimes get jaded about the role that products can play in IT outsourcing, but carefully chosen ones do have a role.
In this case study, a large medical services company with development sites in St. Paul, MN and India, wasted a lot of time simply downloading the project every time a developer or tester from one side or the other had to access it. The download would last between 9 and 30 minutes. Add that up across dozens of developers and you’re looking at a considerable sinkhole of thumb-twiddling.
Sure, the solution involved Borland’s software — in this case, StarTeam MPX with Cache Agent. That 9 to 30 minute checkout process was whittled back to 1.3 minutes. This company apparently estimated that it saved $6 million annually due to new performance efficiencies. (I asked whether there were other factors there, but the speakers never got to my question.)
Borland’s software development collaboration product won Microsoft’s Best Software Management Tool award at TechEd Europe this year. I don’t know how the award was voted on, but somebody else besides Borland must find it of value.
You can read a whitepaper from Borland, titled, “Putting Your Own House in Order Before Offshoring,” here. Consider yourself fortunate. I had to sit through a rather dull Webcast to get my copy.
Addendum: If you do want to view the Webinar, you can register for access to that here:
