Well, if Oracle gets to the point where they have the best of both worlds, meaning, an R&D center in India and an R&D center here and quality products are coming out at a lower cost, then great! BTW when I say outsource I understand it is a wholly owned oracle sub in India. There is another level of outsourcing which is contract manufacturing to China etc., and those are 3rd parties, but there isn't much of that in software because your IP gets stolen. So I don't think Oracle will go that route.
The problem is that apps R&D, at least at first release, needs to be produced in conjunction with the highest level companies/customers who are going to use it. Thats the best way to do it, anyway, to ensure that these things really do work in the real world. The problem with oracle first-release apps is that they only work in the lab. The minute they get out to the customer base its kaboom!
Its hard to say why all these bugs exist in oracle code, but my belief is, the people that write them have no real world experience as to how these things actually get used. This has always been a problem at Oracle, btw, it is not new to outsourcing. When I worked at Oracle they hired what they used to call "class of's" (new college hires) to write key pieces of the application suite- this would be AR billing, ship-to-order, etc. Of course, people just out of college have a tough time conceiving of business rules and consequently a lot of mistakes were made. This outsourcing imo is another spin on that same issue, and the result is the same- products that don't work.
If there are people in that offshore facility who have done, say, 5 largescale implementations of manufacturing software and have run large warehouses that dealt with currency issues and taxation and duty and all the things that go into these packages, not having anything to do with Oracle per se, and these types of people are your team leads who are designing and building the software- (basically, the kind of people SAP hires in Germany)- then I would say Oracle will get their act together in India. But I don't think there is an abundance of people like this in India, and these are not the people Oracle hires anyway... they look for IIT graduates which are just plain old smart people like we have here in SV, its just that they cost less. Whoopee that isn't going to fix the problem. And at least here, we have companies in the area that have to use oracle apps so new hires at Oracle can get some real world experience eventually, on some support call locally.
I don't know if outsourcing is Oracle's only problem. But I know they have big, big product issues and this is not going to solve them. I want to see Oracle clean up its act before radical moves like this are implemented. And I don't think we are seeing exemplary management out of oracle, certainly nobody is worth almost a million options. |
