Leveraging a global advantage

The relationship between Virtusa and edocs, which delivers online account management and customer self-service support, is similar. “We’ll keep the high-level IP,” Snyder says, “and [Virtusa] will supply the software-development muscle.”

Free IT resource Hear how top CIOs turn change into a competitive advantage. Sponsored by HP Free IT resource Attend the SOA Executive Forum: Breaking SOA Bottlenecks SOAExecForum.com/may2007 Sponsored by InfoWorld

These scenarios remind Assembla’s Singleton of the “surgeon” model proposed by Frederick Brooks in his classic book, The Mythical Man-Month. As a project manager, according to this view, you are not an administrator but “a very powerful individual contributor, supported by a team that does research, writes components, and ... hands you the scalpel when you need it.”

Merging collaborative models and open source

If you’re betting the farm on this kind of teamwork, your team had better not look like a black box. In fact, emerging collaborative models are often highly transparent, a key tactic of open-source methodology. Not only is every line of source code capable of being browsed from a Web-based CVS repository, but so are all the test results, bug reports, design documents, and related e-mail discussions.

According to CollabNet’sBehlendorf, transparency is as useful to business managers as it is to software teams. Barclays Global Investment, for example, has hundreds of CollabNet users worldwide. Many of those, Behlendorf says, are not software developers but business sponsors taking the pulse of projects they own or depend on.

Outsourcers can offer — and clients should expect — the same kind of visibility into activities that would otherwise be placed in silos. Coupling that with an intense focus on deadlines and deliverables, which open-source projects often lack, they claim to offer the best of both worlds: open-source tactics and a commercial mind-set.

Transparency also acts as a hedge against vendor lock-in, although outsourcers won’t be the first to point this out. When a software project runs transparently and is supported by a robust test suite, development resources are fungible in more ways than one. It’s feasible, albeit never trivial, to shift work from one offshore outfit to another. Another benefit of being able to see through silo walls is the vastly improved ability to spot duplications of effort and to identify opportunities for reuse.

Enterprise IT regards the cornucopia of open-source software with mixed feelings. The price is right. Because source code is available and because its creators operate online and are often highly accessible, IT managers can in principle control their own destiny. In practice, that requires more time and intellectual effort than enterprises can afford. But time and intellectual effort are exactly the resources that offshore outfits have in abundance.

Not everyone agrees that open-source projects are the best way to spend those resources. EPAM is tracking the technologies, says Bogretsov, adding that he recruits engineering talent that bubbles up in open-source projects. But as yet, in corporate America ’s mainstream, Bogretsov thinks that “no one will install [open-source database] MySQL instead of Oracle.”

Virtusa doesn’t argue that point but is actively engaged on a number of open-source fronts. “We allow employees to contribute to open-source projects during work hours,” says Chamindra de Silva, R&D manager at Virtusa. In fact, one Virtusa employee, LilanthaDarshana, is working on a C++ version of Apache AXIS (Apache eXtensible Interaction System), the SOAP framework that powers a number of Java-based Web services platforms.

Although it’s hard to quantify the kinds of synergies that offshore outsourcers’ involvement within the open-source movement can produce, there are anecdotal glimpses. Pegasystems’ Baggot says that the time to produce one component, which had been estimated to be 45 man-days, shrank to one day because a Virtusa partner had knowledge of and expertise with an open-source component that could meet the need.

“What Virtusa and others represent is a big part of your R&D effort right out of the box,” edocs’ Snyder says. Although edocs does not yet support JBoss on Linux, customer demand is looming on the horizon. Rather than launch a Web services research effort, for which no budget exists, Snyder plans to rely on Virtusa to get up to speed on the technologies if and when the company decides to deploy them. “It’s enormously powerful for an engineering manager like myself to have a partner like that,” he says.

Outsourcer EPAM, according to Senior Vice President David Scott, “maintains a bench of at least 15 percent” — that is, offshore workers who conduct research, identify patterns that emerge from multiple client engagements, develop reusable components to address common themes such as content management and workflow, and build teams around those components.

“A team might come in for just part of a project,” Scott says, “very much like what you see in the film industry.”