Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Desperate mapmakers and lucky outsourcers

I should pay a bit of attention to the IT side on this blog. Jana Seta, a Latvian publisher of print and digital maps, has repeatedly called me with a lamentation that 85 % of their digital product has been stolen and copied. Welcome to the real world...
However, the problem is that the editors of a certain paper don't think that the story is worth publishing (if 85 % of the warehouse of, say a major home electronics company were carted off during the night, it would be another story). One argument is the belief that Jana Seta used old Soviet maps (USSR state property?) to make its digital maps (GIS systems, really) , therefore it is more OK to steal from them than if they had made the maps from scratch (just imagine what doing original satellite photography and aerial surveillance would do to costs...).
Whatever the reason, the story of the pillage of Jana Seta by various cyberpirates (including those who put the maps on their websites for commercial purposes, i.e. how to find our office, etc.) isn't going to get told, except here. So now some justice is done..
Another story that I think is in a holding pattern for the trash/underplayed bin is that TeliaSonera has selected Latvia Dati Exigen as one of its 14 suppliers of IT services over the next two years. TeliaSonera has cut the number of suppliers from 29 and Dati Exigen is the first East European country to be selected. This is a signal that, despite having such luminaries and giants as Accenture and TietoEnator among the 14, TeliaSonera is slowly shifting its IT operations to the somewhat cheaper, high quality, high efficiency Baltic nearshore. This has already caused some alarm on the Scandinavian IT services market, I am told. Unfortunately, TeliaSonera doesn't disclose its specific IT spending, but it appears that the Dati Exigen share of it will be a substantial single figure millions of USD sum, and will push the capacity of the Latvian company (with headquarters in San Francisco) to the maximum. As many as 100 people may be needed to do the work for the Swedes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sērčojot video.google.com pēc vārda Latvia, uzreiz uzrāvos uz tava videobloga :) Nice!

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