Commentary: Is Outsourcing On The Outs?
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BusinessWeek Online - The announcement sent ripples of anxiety through the tech world. On Sept. 15, J.P. Morgan Chase &amp; Co.  said that it was terminating a seven-year, &#36;5 billion technology-outsourcing deal with IBM. For many, it's an article of faith that corporations will gradually hand off ever more of their technology operations to big service providers such as IBM, Accenture , and Electronic Data Systems . Yet here was the nation's second-largest bank taking its tech back because it was strategically too important to be left to an outsider. ...
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The rise of the Indian rupee against the U.S. dollar is affecting Indian outsourcers.
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When I suggested in a recent column that a problematic 5 percent of employees account for 75 percent of the IT support burden, I expected a wave of âright on!â letters from IT support staffers. After the column was published, the letters did come â most of them disagreeing with my premise, with one reader suggesting that the real whiner was yours truly. I still think itâs outside the realm of overextended IT departments to provide training on basic computing skills (which I defined as âmanaging and finding files, and basic working knowledge of suites such as MS Officeâ). But my thinking was adjusted a bit by the thoughtful feedback.
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Beef up your PowerPoint presentations with our newest collection of Outsourcing facts. As part of our Outscoucing Special Report and Knowledge Center, Data Points are compiled to help IT executives make business and technology decisions.
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The traditional competition for U.S. offshore outsourcing business was between nations. That's about to change, according to a new study.
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Experts in a field can benefit from an outsiderâs perspective.
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India's outsourcing industry continues to do well despite higher staff costs.
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The best of Computerworld's coverage of IT outsourcing.
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Indian outsourcing companies have to move beyond low-cost services on an hourly-rate basis to offering complete services, according to an outsourcing consultancy.
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BERKELEY, Calif. Bill Gates weighed in on the subject of job outsourcing during a speech at UC Berkeley today -- a big topic with the audience of engineering students whose futures now seem as uncertain as Silicon Valley&#39;s economy.
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It's not just work that's being outsourced from wealthy nations to poorer ones. These days, online gamers in developing countries are being paid to earn virtual goods that wealthier players are too lazy or unskilled to win on their own. By Laila Weir.
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New report on offshoring points to greater acceptance among Australians.
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A panel of executives at the IBM Rational user conference talk about the challenges of using offshore outsourcing firms for development projects.
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Strong job outlook offset by skills shortage The outlook for jobs in the European technology sector is good but the spectre of outsourcing looms ominously, according to a new report.â¦
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While media and political attention is on the threat of outsourcing, the reality is that outsourcing is a sideshow in a much larger event.
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BALTIMORE - Health care organizations not considering offshore outsourcing are missing out on significant cost savings, but administrators need to be aware of potential risks, including lax handling of data security by some vendors and the effect on employee morale, a health care IT analyst said Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Indian outsourcing companies have to move beyond low-cost services on an hourly-rate basis to offering complete services, according to an outsourcing consultancy. A model that is based primarily on the low cost of Indian staff will not be sustainable by Indian providers in the long term, as the cost advantage is eroding, said Dennis McGuire, chairman of outsourcing consultancy firm, Technology Partners InternationalÂ (TPI) in Houston, Texas. Large competitors like IBM and Accenture are also expanding operations in India to take advantage of low-cost staff, he said. âWhen I go to a restaurant, I want a chicken dish and not a rate-card telling me how much the chefâs time will cost me,â McGuire told reporters Wednesday. There isnât much risk, nor promise of great reward, in the current labor-cost arbitrage model adopted by Indian providers, he said. Indian service providers must make more investments in senior staff, and industry specific applications and tools if they want to win big contracts, said Peter Allan, a partner at TPI. They will have to develop industry-specific applications, such as a billing system for telecommunications companies, around which they can offer services to customers, said Siddharth Pai, another partner at TPI. Indian providers have been reluctant to trade current margins for long-term revenue opportunities because investors expect far higher margins from Indian service companies than from their multinational competitors, TPI said. Only recently have these outsourcers indicated that they are willing to accept total outsourcing deals that involve transferring customer staff and assets, Pai said. The reluctance of Indian outsourcers to address the lower-revenue domestic outsourcing business will also hurt them as the market shifts from plain coding and testing to higher-end transformation services, research firm Gartner said this week. Working on projects in India in these new areas would give Indian outsourcing companies the opportunity to prove their capabilities to customers abroad, said Partha Iyengar, research vice president at Gartner. Indian outsourcing companies such as Infosys Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services are attempting to go up the value chain into IT consulting and services delivered around their products. â They still donât offer the full array of services, and in applications they only have products in the core banking area,â Pai said. However,Â business is still strong for Indian outsourcers, according to data released by TPI. Of the number of contracts greater than $50 million awarded last year, the share of Indian service providers went up to 11 percent from 8 percent a year earlier, according to the consultancy. Their share of the total value of these contracts went up to 7 percent from 4 percent a year earlier, it said.