Offshoring - Looking beyond India

With the conclusion of Gartner Inc.’s Outsourcing Summit last week at Dallas, we should be expecting to see some analysis, forecasts and general opinions on the Outsourcing industry in the media this week. Here’s one of them.

This article in Computerworld highlights the issue of rising costs in Offshoring to India and the alternatives that were discussed during the summit. To quote some of the interesting snippets from the article -

“One conference attendee whose company runs its own offshore development facility in India agreed with Gartner’s assessment of the wage increases in India. “We’re finding that ourselves,” said the attendee, who requested anonymity. He added that his CIO asked him last year to investigate other countries, and his company is currently looking at China as a possible alternative for offshore IT work.“

The primary motive behind sticking with India seems to be the location’s ability in providing the assurance of availability of a large pool of skilled workers. Although information executives are not against looking at other regions of the globe, the standard of service that has already been established by India based service providers seems to be hard to match, by providers from other locations.

But I have always found that the most interesting piece of information in such articles is always in the discussion that ensues between the proponents and opponents of outsourcing in the discussion thread. The discussion thread in this articles seems to indicate that it is going in a similar direction as well!

Stay tuned… more analysis and forecast will follow.

- Vinod