Outsourcing Comes to the Americas
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Businesses are starting to sour on Asia and turning to Latin America and the U.S. for IT services.
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(InfoWorld) - The outsourcing and offshoring of software development work has become such an ingrained part of the technology industry in the U.S. that stories about it no longer rouse the public's interest as they did even a few years ago. That means the only way to gauge the growth of the phenomenon is by watching the bottom line of outsourcing giants like India's Wipro, which recently reported a 41 percent jump in revenue in its latest fiscal year, and the heated debate in Washington over the number of H-1B high-tech visas that the federal government grants. But the runaway growth of offshoring has created its own problems in countries like India, where a substandard infrastructure and stiff competition for talented workers has changed the economics of setting up shop outside the U.S. The decision to hire a staff in India "wasn't even a second thought" when Munjal Shah, CEO of RiyaÂ , was laying the groundwork for his visual search startup back in 2004. (Riya is part of InfoWorldâs Month of Enterprise Startups feature.) "At 30 percent wage rates [the ratio of an Indian salary to a U.S. salary], it still was worth the communication overhead, the travel, and the late-night conference calls," Shah recalls. Those were the good old days. Today, wages in India have risen so much that maintaining development operations in Silicon Valley and India no longer made sense, forcing Riya to make what seems like an unusual decision: In April, the company nixed its Bangalore operations and consolidated operations back in the company's Silicon Valley headquarters. In the end, the cost advantages of lower Indian wages did not outweigh the efficiency losses that came from maintaining some 35 employees in two offices, 12 hours apart, Shah said.Â  Indian software development shops have been the workhorse for countless high-tech firms and U.S. enterprises for more than a decade. But steady demand for development talent is erasing some of the cost advantages that offshore development outfits have enjoyed, according to a report by Gartner. In fact, the wage rates for Indian software engineers will reach between 40 to 50 percent of Silicon Valley wages by 2008 with the gap continuing to narrow after that.Â  Wage increases for Indian engineers averaged 15 percent from 2005 to 2006, compared with a 3 percent average increase for U.S. engineers, according to a recent Gartner report. That's not to say that things will be even-steven any time soon, though. "Even if Indian salaries continue to grow at 15 percent annually, it would take 16 years for Indian software engineers to catch their U.S. counterparts," the report says. But wages among startup employees have been growing much faster than that, especially among top engineers in Bangalore, Shah said. A native of India, Shah paid a premium to hire experienced graduates of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. Unlike IBM or Infosys, a startup doesn't have the resources to train the brand-new graduates who would work for smaller salaries. "Startups aren't places where you train people from the ground up," Shah said. "They're places where either you know what you're doing or you don't. We paid to hire the best." To that end, Shah said, wage increases among his engineers in Bangalore tended toward twice the national average. "Salary increases have been 30 percent for more than a year now," Shah said; the engineers who lost a job when Riya decided to close the Bangalore office all have received multiple job offers with significant wage increases, he said. Differences in the high-tech cultures of the U.S. and India also play a part. Indian workers are less likely than their Californian counterparts to be wooed by the prospect of working for stock options instead of cash.Â  "In Silicon Valley, you see your friends from Google driving around in new Ferraris, and you think, 'Huh, occasionally this actually works,'" said Shah. "But there's no comparable value for options [in India]."Â  And without the lure of options that might someday make a software engineer wealthy, money isn't just one reason for a Bangalore engineer to join a company â it's the only reason.Â Â  "If you can't build a core loyalty with options, then you're in for a tough time," said Keerti Melkote, cofounder of wireless LAN hardware company Aruba, which went public in March. Aruba tried outsourcing to India shortly after the birth of the company in 2002 but found that it slowed down operations too much for it to be worthwhile.Â  "You need a critical mass for offshoring to work -- a whole project as opposed to part of one project -- and for a startup, offshoring might not make sense. Especially now, the loaded cost of all the late-night conference calls is high enough that it might not make sense." Melkote said that with its growth in the last few years, Aruba can now afford to support a fairly autonomous Indian operations center in Bangalore. But startups don't have that option. "We found that if you gave a guy less than a 30 percent salary increase every year, then he'd walk," Shah said. "By the middle of this year, we would have been paying [the Indian engineers] 75 percent of a U.S. salary, and at that point, it doesn't make sense because of all the other overheads that take away from productivity." What kinds of overheads you ask? "On average the power probably goes out three or four times a day," said Fran Karamouzis, a research vice president at Gartner who specializes in outsourcing issue. âYou get surges for 15 or 20 minutes, and if you don't have adequate power supplies, then that's a big issue." Thatâs a big issue for startups, whose employees often work odd hours from home, Shah said.Â  Of course, infrastructure problems are nothing new and are considered par for the course in India, but with competition from China, Russia, Eastern Europe, and even Vietnam and Africa, unreliable infrastructure is starting to cost India business, such as Intel's recent decision to locate a $2.5 billion chip plant in China. The nature of work at a startup makes them even less tolerant of those kinds of risks than companies like Intel. "If you're a startup and you're doing a lot of iterative design and you constantly need a higher level of agility, you might find it more burdensome than the cost differential is worth," Karamouzis said. On the other hand, "If you can give the Indian team things that are clearly delineated that they can own and drive on their own, then it works out pretty well," said Pejman Roshan, cofounder and senior director of marketing at Agito Networks, a wireless technology startup in Sunnyvale, Calif. that outsources software coding to a services firm in Bangalore. Roshan acknowledged, though, that the wage gap is shrinking. "I'd heard there was a five-to-one [ratio of Silicon Valley wages to Bangalore wages], and we were salivating at that notion," Roshan said. "We're seeing a three-to-one benefit, and we're still happy with that." Riya's Shah is confident that moving the company's operations back to the U.S. was the right move and expects to see more companies doing the same in the months ahead.Â  "We might be a little bit ahead of the curve in our decision -- maybe six to 12 months -- but I don't think wages are going to stop rising," said Shah, who detailed his decision in his CEO blog, Recognizing Deven. "I don't think weâre isolated." Still, despite wage increases, new startups aren't likely to rule out Indian operations any time soon, Gartnerâs Karamouzis said. In fact, they may have to consider such operations in order to get venture capital. "More often than not, what I hear is that venture companies are almost demanding that [startups] leverage India or Russia both to optimize the cost structure and to maximize a 24-hour cycle to get things done faster," Karamouzis said.
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Driven by one of the largest and most sustained economic expansions in history, China is increasingly turning to South America as a supplier.
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Outsourcing of American jobs to Asia has become a hot-button issue in the presidential election with White House aspirant Senator John Kerry promising the most sweeping reform of international tax law in four decades to halt the trend.
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Company outsources e-mail for small to medium businesses.
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Close on the heels of the&#160;appreciation of the Indian rupee against the dollar, Indian outsourcing companies are grappling with a new problem -- uncertainty among U.S. companies about a recession has made these companies delay finalizing their IT budgets.As a result many large deals between U.S. clients and Indian outsourcers will not be finalized in the first half of this year, said Sudin Apte, senior analyst and country head for India at Forrester Research.Business will however pick up for Indian outsourcers by the fourth quarter, particularly if the U.S. economy is in mild recession, Apte said.&quot;Our experience is that if the IT budgets of U.S. customers are marginally impacted in a recession, then there is an increase in business offshore, to cut costs,&quot; Apte said. If the cuts are too large, whole projects can however get canned, he warned.The U.S. is the largest market for Indian outsourcers.&quot;We believe that the recessionary nature of today&#39;s economic climate will promote the adoption of increased outsourcing,&quot; said Siddharth Pai, a partner at outsourcing consultancy firm, Technology Partners International Inc. (TPI) in Houston, Texas.TPI does not as yet see a cut in either discretionary or non-discretionary spending on IT by companies.Forrester said Monday that the IT services and outsourcing market will increase by 4 percent this year to $162 billion from a growth rate of 6 percent a year earlier.&#160;The research firm forecast slowing growth this year&#160;for purchases of IT products and services in the U.S.National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom), a trade organization in Delhi, however remains optimistic about the growth of India&#39;s outsourcing industry. The industry is optimistic of achieving its target of $60 billion in software and services exports by March, 2010, the association said Monday.In the fiscal year to March 31, the industry expects export revenues of $40.3 billion, up by 29 percent from export revenue in the previous year.Problems for India&#39;s outsourcing industry could get however compounded as its customers abroad have seen a drop in overall satisfaction and a drop in value for money from offshore outsourcing to India, according to a Forrester survey. India is still preferred as an offshore destination because it is the only country where foreign companies can&#160;hire staff in the thousands, Apte said.
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While the market in Central and South America is growing faster than the U.S., Asia, and most of Europe, it still faces some challenges that need to be overcome.
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Infosys Technologies profits from global outsourcing trends.
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Investor's Business Daily - A mix of low-cost labor and high-quality software and services has proved a bonanza for outsourcing firms in India, sending American rivals IBM  , Accenture   and others scrambling to cash in.
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Indiaâs outsourcing industry continues to do well despite theÂ appreciation of the Indian rupeeÂ against the U.S. dollar and higher staff costs.
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Developing countries are starting to flex their financial muscles and invest overseas.
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Europe has become the new hotspot for outsourcing contracts, exceeding the U.S. in terms of the value of major outsourcing deals awarded last year, global sourcing firm Technology Partners International Inc. (TPI) said Friday.
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New venture in India raises questions about the evolution of offshore outsourcing.
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By Scarborough, Robert  FOR CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDUCATION, THE GLOBALIZATION OF the American economy is a challenge and an opportunity.
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Edward Yourdon, a co-founder of the Cutter Consortium, says in an upcoming book that the threat of offshore outsourcing isn't restricted to U.S. software development jobs but to all kinds of knowledge work.
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Accounts for half of global deals Demand for outsourcing in Europe has increased dramatically in the first half of 2007, compared with the same period last year, according to the latest Quarterly Index from labour sourcing advisers TPI.â¦
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Australia's IT News reports the findings of a recent survey in which more than 20 percent of company execs said they were considering or recommending offshore outsourcing. [Outsourcing Blog]