Europe rubber-stamps IBM Lufthansa outsourcing gig The European Commission has given IBM the green light to splash $1.25bn on Lufthansa's tech infrastructure wing. As part of the deal, which includes an outsourcing agreement, the airline will split its subsidiary, Lufthansa Systems, into three companies, offloading the infrastructure division to Big Blue. "The Commission …
"I look forward to the Germans trying to be understood by an Indian call centre"
I work for a German company that did this (with HP) and regretted it ever since, with crap, crap, crap service, slow reponse, inability to hold them to what we thought was an SLA, costs higher than when we did it inefficiently in house. The director responsible has moved on, funnily enough, but we're stuck with the turds of HP.
But to be fair, they do outsource the German speaking call centre a bit closer to home. Specifically some shit hole in Eastern Europe, so the Germans will only have to struggle (a) to understand a Romanian accent, and (b) to find somebody to answer the phone in Romania, since under EU freedom of movement rules anybody with both language and any business or IT skills isn't going to sit around being paid 2 groats a year in some East European backwater.
The company I work for does work with Lufthansa. We're far from a bottom-of-the-barrel, lowest-bidder IT outsourcer like IBM, and we _still_ have major issues dealing with them. It's a personality thing more than anything else.
I cannot imagine the hilarity that will ensue the first time the LH folks are told that they now need to call IBM's Global Center of Excellence Support Desk and talk to "Steve" for even the simplest IT change. Or maybe it's a good thing -- ITIL and the like might appeal to the rigid engineering culture. It all depends on how many more layers of crap they now have to wade through to do something, just like any IT outsourcing deal.
And made it back out alive I think. At least as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with the aircraft or flight crews. Might not want to have a billing account with Lufthansa any time soon though.
As for two languages and any business or IT skills, same applies in India as it does in Eastern Europe. Soon as they own a clue they've moved on to better pastures.
Expect applications from German IT folks bailing out before shipping over.
IBM Gameplan
Year 1: We take your mess
Year 2: We eliminate everyone who knows anything
Year 3: We squeeze you to death with change control for everything
Year 4: We are nice again so your resign the contract
Lufthansa should start building net new apps in the cloud and leave the old ones to die under IBM.
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