Forrester Research, a research and consulting firm in its report says that, jobs that are getting lost in the United States due to software outsourcing are basically low salary IT jobs such as software programming or computer support specialists or computer operators. However, on the other hand, high paying jobs like system analysts, network analysts and research analysts are continuing dominating the market. In fact, jobs in this sector are growing at the steadily rate of 4 to 5% every year. Normally, these jobs require excellent domain knowledge and idea about the internal working of IT systems and business process. In software outsourcing these qualities are difficult to find.

Jobs that not get affected by software outsourcing

Higher skilled jobs such as system analysis and application development are increasing at the rate of 6% per year. That’s because, their demand is growing continuously. Also, software outsourcing can be shifted to India or other offshore software development countries, where buyers need in-house workforce to customize and upholder software.

Reasons for decrease in Software outsourcing in future

Are you the one afraid from this boom of software outsourcing? If yes, there is news which can lower down your fear for a great extent. According to a report, attraction of cost saving in software outsourcing is yet very high and because of that, increase in jobs like software programmer will be very less. That further results into very low increase in software programming jobs, salary rise will also hardly 1% in next few years. In fact, salary of computer operators and database administrators will also grow at the minimal rate of 1%. However, salaries of computer research scientists and information system managers will have highest growth at around 3.5% every year whereas salaries of analysts and system administrators will grow at the rate of 2 to 3% every year.

Offshore software development

It is also predicted that the market of software outsourcing which has major costs saving today will decrease by 2008. The main reason behind this will be the decreasing gap between the US salary and the outsourcing countries such as India. As, it will lower the salary in US, while in India and other offshore software development countries, because of lack of availability of resources, salary rise will be very high. It will also decrease the costs saving. Finally, companies will prefer their in-house resources rather then offshore outsourcing.

Author is famous IT expert.

If you company is small or mid-size special products or materials exchange broker, you probably have custom in-house made exchange application. Nowadays exchange is done over the internet, so you might have advanced web-based exchange application. Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains could play the role of the backend: accounting, sales and purchasing ordering, backordering, allocation, collection. In this case we expect tight integration between your exchange application and Great Plains. In this small article we consider industry / market niche specifics and the ways to realize these requirements:

• Exchange Transaction. Exchange transaction usually has two parts: Sales and Purchasing. This transaction should be translated into Great Plains as Sales Order in Sales Order Processing (SOP) and Purchase Order in Purchase Order Processing (POP). Assuming that you have web developers and C#, VB.Net programmers, you can deploy eConnect Distribution – this is Software Development Kit with sample codes, you can create or modify Great Plains objects, such as Sales Order, Customer record, Purchase Order, Vendor record. One warning about eConnect – it is designed based on general ERP application principles: you can create work transaction only – you can not post transaction, this is left for the Great Plains user

• Bill of Lading. In materials selling, when you order something you probably know number of packs or bundles, but you do not know exact weight or length. You get this information when you receive Bill of Lading. You need Bill of Lading automatic integration and qty update in Sales Order or Purchase Order. At this moment you do Sales Order allocation. eConnect, mentioned above should do the job

• Agent Commission. You could use Salesperson, associate him/her with items sold in Sales Order and then calculate and pay commission, using your own formulas.

• Reporting. In the case of integrated web application with Great Plains, we would expect heterogeneous sql queries and reporting, based on these queries and stored procedures. To produce nice and flexible reports – you usually deploy Crystal Reports and publish them in your web application.

• Transaction Posting. As mentioned above – this should be preferably done by Great Plains user with approval logic. However if you have thousands transactions per day or hour and it is physically not possible, you should go beyond eConnect functionality and post transactions automatically. You need custom stored procedures, posting and transferring Sales Orders. You can create these procedures yourself or purchase the ones, available on the market.

• Customization Tools: Great Plains Dexterity, Modifier with VBA, Transact SQL scripting to name the most popular.

Good luck and you can always seek our help in customization, implementation, integration and support. Call us: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Continental Europe, Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer