Gary Kroc Offshore development past, present and future

Offshore development has been done successfully for many years and is now evolving to take advantage of huge talent pools across the world using technology, tools and network bandwidth put in place over the last 10 years. Global development is not a panacea and a few key lessons learned will be shared . IBM has been at the forefront of this offshore/global development revolution. This presentation will cover how global offshore development has evolved, what we are currently focused on to ensure project success using global common processes, best practices and tools ( SEI CMMI Level 5 ), and finally where we see the future of global development in such areas as the creation of SW factories and follow-the-sun project execution.

Mr. Kroc is Director of Global Delivery and Sourcing, responsible for IBM's Americas Group Application Services use and growth of strategic off shore I/T development centers. He also manages the commercial Transition, Transformation and off shore Migration Management services based in the US. His Global Delivery focus is currently on three strategic country sites — India, China & Brazil. He has over 3600 large teams working across 11 country sites world wide.

Mr. Kroc has over 28 years of High Tech Industry experience and 25 years with the IBM company. He has extensive Application Development experiences including global implementations of complex Systems Integration projects covering Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems packages such as SAP and Siebel as well as custom developed Web and mainframe applications for both internal and commercial clients. He has held a number of executive management positions in technical and business areas across IBM including IBM's Software Group, Global Services, Sales & Distribution and the CIO's Office. He holds a Masters Degree in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh University, completed an executive program at Harvard University's Business School and is professionally certified as both a project manager and SAP consultant.