continue to change rapidly for the next five years.

For us to understand carefully, what's going on in the industry at large

it helps for us to have a deeper understanding of the history of the

outsourcing industry.

It's an issue that was born in the 80's and over the course in the nineties expanded a

footprint

to serve primarily tier-1 customers and primarily for call center,

back-office, data entry, and help desk-style workloads. Workloads that were

very labor-intensive

and for any given task is moderately critical workload.

Over the course of the 90's, these same companies and new entrants like IBM

Cognizant, Infosys, and TCS that are focused on the IT industry

joined the industry in focused again on workloads that were very labor intensive

and moderately critical. For example, research and development of new features

or life cycle management of production applications.

And by life cycle management I mean the development and R&D piece

of the life cycle management; patching, tax code, compliance updates, and so on.

Over the course of the 2000 to 2005 timeframe,

this footprint increased to include ongoing operational support of live

production systems

and that's when all this maturation has occurred.

What it means is that the large-scale outsourcers are focused on serving

primarily tier-1 customers and primarily for labor intensive workloads.

Since 2005 however, the industry has

experienced a very rapid transition in the operations world.

As a result of Moore's law, data center consolidation,

server consolidation, virtualization,

and of course the adoption of cloud, we've seen the average system become

incredibly much more critical,

while simultaneously the overall labor intensitivity of the infrastructure

management workload has plummeted.

As a result, the large-scale major outsourcing companies are built wrong.

They tend to be built with larger teams of relatively average people,

and as a result the cost savings are there, but the quality of service is eroded.

There's a new crop of

outsourcing companies that has entered the market. They are focused on creating

breakthrough

outcomes for the systems, as opposed to cutting costs.

They are focused on breakthrough security characteristics,

availability characteristics, and of course better human reliability.

Those companies focus on attracting elite talent

and are organizing for response times in the handful of

minutes. And so these companies are taking over the market in terms of

valuable systems, systems that are extremely closely tied to revenue.

We've written a white paper on these larger trends and how you can

use these services to your advantage on our website.

By all means, come on over and download it.