Doing Business in Real Time
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The global economy has a life of its own, it lives in real-time, and we are all part of it. Hello brave new world.
Power of Talent Driving Creation of a Smarter Planet
Investments in education plus information and communication technologies are delivering surprising results
A trip to Vietnam in December brought home to me how quickly the planetary division of labor is changing. All that fiber optic cable that telecom companies laid down around the world ten years ago created oversupply back then, but now this infrastructure enables companies to tap into the talent they need anywhere in the world as that talent emerges. The spread of free market economies combined with rapid growth of information and communication technologies is driving change at a pace that challenges all of us to keep up or risk being left behind.
Vietnam is a rapidly rising new talent pool in the global IT services market. Half their population of 89 million is 25 years old or younger and 85% of Vietnamese students in colleges and universities go into science, technology, engineering or math. The government has made major investments in telecommunications; 80% of the population now has 3G and WiFi coverage; and 30% already use the Internet on a daily basis. Also for the last 15 years, English has been the country’s official second language and it is taught to all students starting at the grade school level.
[ I do lively presentations on this and related topics - mhugos@yahoo.com ]
I visited with two companies that have opened offices in Vietnam to support global operations and offer IT services to customers around the world. Both are publicly traded companies; one is Harvey Nash (HVN, traded on the London stock exchange) and the other is IBM (IBM, traded on the New York stock exchange). Both companies are seeing rapid growth in their Vietnam business operations.
Clockwise from top: Harvey Nash office in Ho Chi Minh City; one of their project teams; head of IBM Ho Chi Minh City office; people in Harvey Nash BPO center
Development Centers in Vietnam Support Global IT Operations
Harvey Nash first opened an office in Vietnam in 2000 when it seemed like a risky move. At the time they decided to explore Vietnam as an alternative to India or China and now they are quick to tout the advantages they enjoy from being in Vietnam. I met with Cuong Nguyen Hung, 36, head of their Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) office and his management team. They all have advanced degrees, and were proud of the advantages they could offer customers: a well educated workforce coming out of universities; lower staff turnover rates than those in India; lower cost of labor than India; and widespread modern telecom and cloud computing infrastructure.
Cuong told me they focus on what he called “post 2000 technologies” such as Java, .Net and C++, and they’re developing particular expertise in telecommunications and business intelligence applications. For customers such as Alcatel Lucent and Hearst Communications they offer the ability to quickly scale up project teams by supplying them with lower and mid-level developers and QA and help desk people. Harvey Nash presently employs about 1,000 people in Vietnam and hiring has accelerated in the last couple of years.
At IBM I talked with Thieu Phuong Nam, 40, who is in charge of the Ho Chi Minh City office. He has a PhD in computer science, and explained how the Vietnamese government has focused investment in IT infrastructure. He illustrated this by noting that 10 years ago Internet access was hard to get and charges were about twice an engineer’s monthly salary, but now Internet access costs just $8 a month. “Vietnam benefits from a strategy called ‘China-plus-one’”, he said, “we want to
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