Study: Indian diaspora helped outsourcing movement
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Indian professionals, venture capitalists (VCs), and entrepreneurs of Indian origin helped promote India as an outsourcing destination, according to a study conducted for the World Bank Institute in Washington, D.C., by Evalueserve Inc., a business intelligence and research firm.
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After internal documents revealed plans to send nearly 5,000 jobs to developing countries over two years, IBM became an easy target for critics of outsourcing. Will limiting layoffs take the sting out of moving these jobs abroad?
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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.
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BANGALORE, INDIA -- As hiring picks up in Bangalore, India, the city's software professionals are again acquiring the spoiled-brat image they had in the late 1990s, when the dot-com boom increased staff requirements at Indian outsourcing companies.
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Export revenue of a large number of Indian outsourcing companies was brought under the tax net in the country's federal budget. The tax could be the first of measures by the government to reduce tax benefits for the country's outsourcing industry.
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Canada's stability, proximity and cultural similarity to the U.S. tend to attract higher-value, more sophisticated outsourcing work than countries like India.
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Although India still gets the bulk of U.S. offshoring dollars, the number of countries companies are eyeing is expanding as they seek specific IT skills and follow-the-sun delivery.
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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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Infosys Technologies profits from global outsourcing trends.
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India&#39;s largest outsourcer, Tata Consultancy Services, Wednesday reported strong growth in revenue and profit, despite earlier concerns that the&#160;Indian outsourcing industry would be badly hit by a weak dollar, and a crisis in the U.S. subprime mortgage market.The company&#39;s revenue for the quarter, ended Dec. 31, was 59 billion rupees ($1.5 billion at the exchange rate on the closing day of the quarter), up by 22 percent from the same quarter in the previous year. Profit increased by 20.5 percent to 13.3 billion rupees.The company said it had improved its operating margin despite a 2.3 percent appreciation of the rupee against the dollar during the quarter, by cost-cutting and improving productivity. The rupee has gained about 12 percent over the dollar in the last year.Infosys Technologies, India&#39;s second largest outsourcer, said last week that its revenue for the quarter ended Dec. 31 increased by 32 percent, to $1.1 billion, from the same quarter in the previous year. Profit for the quarter rose by 42.2 percent to $310 million.Revenue growth rates are, however, not likely to be as high going forward, mainly because the companies already have large revenue bases, according to analysts.In the application development and maintenance market, where Indian companies are dominant players with about 36 percent market share, the opportunity to increase revenue isn&#39;t very large, said Siddharth Pai, a partner at Technology Partners International. The company is a sourcing consultancy firm in Houston.Indian companies are looking at new services lines, but it will take some time for these businesses to be key revenue earners, Pai said.Indian outsourcers also compete for staff with the Indian operations of multinational services companies like Accenture and IBM. Quality staff is increasingly harder to hire, and&#160;salaries are on the upswing.Infosys, for example, added 8,100 employees in the last quarter, taking its staff to 88,601 at the end of December. Tata added 4,037 in the quarter, giving it a headcount of staff to 108,229. The company&#39;s attrition rate at 12.2 percent was, however, higher than in the previous quarter.
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BANGALORE, INDIA - An anticipated boom in mobile telephony use in India is attracting multinational and local companies to establish manufacturing operations in the country.
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India&#39;s IT services market is forecast to grow to $10.73 billion by 2011, at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 23.2 percent, as outsourcing emerges as a more favored option for companies in India, according to research firm Gartner.As companies are finding it more difficult to hire and retain staff in their IT departments, they are looking at external service providers as an option, hoping to also cut down costs, and better manage growth in the process, Gartner said Tuesday.Indian user companies compete for staff with Indian outsourcing companies and Indian operations of multinational companies, which hire new staff by the thousands each quarter.Staff attrition is however not the key reason why companies are outsourcing, said Arun Gupta, chief technology officer, at Shopper&#39;s Stop, a top Indian retail chain. Driving outsourcing in India is a growing demand for new technologies and applications. Shopper&#39;s Stop has six IT projects in progress with another 12 projects planned for the next six to 12 months.Rather than creating and managing a large IT organization in house, the company is working with service partners to support its 45 IT staff, Gupta said. Some of the functions it outsources are network maintenance, desktop and server maintenance, monitoring enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, and software development, he added.A number of large banks and telecommunications service providers are already outsourcing key IT operations, though the key winners so far have been multinational services companies. Many Indian outsourcing companies had neglected the Indian market in favor of exports, according to a survey last year by Gartner. But that may be changing as the&#160;weakening dollar puts pressure on rupee&#160;realization from exports.IBM,&#160;Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and Wipro together accounted for 26.1 per cent of IT services vendor market share in India last year, according to Gartner. IBM was the top vendor, with 11.2 per cent market share. TCS and Wipro occupy the second and third positions with 10.9 and 4.1 percent market shares, respectively.However, the Indian IT services market is still fragmented, with the majority of the market being serviced by smaller local players that account for close to 40 per cent of the IT services market, according to Gartner.&quot;We have looked at smaller players for very small and specific jobs, but for larger jobs, running into a number of years, and which require a variety of skills, we look at large Indian companies or multinational services companies,&quot; Gupta said.The key segments of the Indian IT services market are hardware maintenance and support, software support, consulting, development and integration, IT management, and process management, Gartner said.
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The Story: Silicon Valley businesses have long argued that changes in the immigration laws are needed to ensure a continuing supply of highly skilled workers. The current limit of 65,000 under the standard H1-B visas is not enough, they say. (The quota was filled in less than a month in 2007.)[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    But that number obscures an important fact: The real total of visas issued to highly skilled workers is closer to 400,000 annually, according to the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) agency. And that, say some critics, may mean that the law is being abused.There are two reasons the number is so large.First, the H1-B visa cap has a built-in exemption that allows an additional 20,000 workers who have graduated from U.S. universities with an advanced degree (master?s or higher) to enter every year.Second ? and the biggest reason ? is the use of L-1 visas, which are granted to executives and workers with specialized skills employed by multinational companies. Because there is no cap on L-1 visas issued each year, the numbers have soared. In the last three years, an average of 315,000 L-1 visas have been issued each year.Unlike the H-1B visas, the L-1 visas are not intended to be a springboard to possible permanent residency and a coveted green card. In essence, the L-1s are intended to allow multinational companies to rotate staff across national borders, so they can transfer foreign managers and specialists within the company to U.S. offices for a limited period of time.But the vast number of workers admitted with L-1 visas has critics suspecting that companies ? Indian outsourcing firms in particular ?are using them as a back door to bring in lower-paid workers to do jobs that could be performed by Americans, rather than for the intended purposes of staff rotation."It's clear that foreign outsourcing firms are abusing the system, and we can't let that continue," Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said earlier this year as Congress debated immigration reform. Here?s what upset him: According to immigration records, 14 of 20 companies whose employees were granted the most L-1 visas were offshore outsourcing firms, including Tata Consultancy, Satyam Computer Services, Wipro, and Infosys Technologies.Tata Consultancy obtained 4,887 L-1s in fiscal 2006 ? the most of any company ? and 3,601 in fiscal 2007, second only to Cognizant (4,869), a U.S.-based outsourcer with a major presence in India. "I find it hard to believe that any one company has that many individuals ? legitimately being transferred within a single year," Durbin said in Congress. (Tata declined to comment to InfoWorld, but a spokesman told BusinessWeek, "We're complying with the law and with the regulations. We want to work with Congress to address any issues they may have.")Infosys, Wipro, Satyam, Tata, and Cognizant also appear on the CIS?s top 10 list of companies obtaining H-1B visas for employees in fiscal 2007, along with Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Motorola, and Intel. Those facts further raise critics? suspicions.Bob Meltzer, who heads the VisaNow firm that helps applicants obtain visas, says there?s a growing belief that the L-1s are being abused today, though he can?t tell if that belief is justified. He does note that the L-1s had been abused in the early 1990s in the manner that critics suspect is happening today.The Bottom Line: Immigration is a tough issue. And it?s even tougher when we don?t have all the facts, as is the case on employers? claims of labor shortages requiring more foreign hires and employees? claims of being replaced by foreign workers by companies looking to save a buck. When you?ve figured out the right balance, let the pols know what you think.Complete list of 2007's underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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New report on offshoring's implications from the British Computer Society.
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So Iâve finally finished the tough slog through The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedmanâs much-cited opus on globalization. One could take issue with the 577-page bookâs uneconomical approach to language, but itâs hard to dismiss its basic economic premise: The playing field is leveling out, as India, China, and other emerging markets plug in to a global economy. Outsourcing is a fact of life.
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How does offshore outsourcing's reigning champion, India, compare against China on software quality, staff costs, and more?
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Working Western contracts in India isn't enough. Now they're outsourcing too.