Nearshoring validated by India's "big three"
TCS, Wipro and Infosys have established offices in Mexico to service US clients, validating the value of being close to clients.
Mexico will be a nearshore development center for our customers in the US. In the initial stage, it will have 300 seats. We are looking at it as a resource pool that will support our US operations predominantly in the same time zone with multi-language capabilities.
Mr S.D. Shibulal, Group Head, Worldwide Sales and Delivery, Infosys
Apart from a strong domestic IT market, Mexico shares a similar time zone with and is within 5-6 hours flying distance from anywhere in the US, allowing us the ability to provide nearshore services for our large US client community.
This facility will help establish our capabilities in the Central time zone which allows us to better serve our North American clients and their operations in Latin America. In addition, this centre will also strengthen our market presence in the region.
BusinessWeek: Mexico: Pumping Out Engineers
This BusinessWeek article, published in May, 2006, describes how Mexico is swiftly upgrading its workforce.
Currently, 451,000 Mexican students are enrolled in full-time undergraduate programs, vs. just over 370,000 in the U.S.
India's outsourcing industry expects to grow by 33%
This ComputerWorld article by John Ribeiro reports that outsourcing to India is expected to grow by 33% to more than US$31 billion.
To achieve this, however, India will have to improve the quality of education and train more staff to counter an expected shortage of 500,000 staff by 2010, according to Nasscom..
The Three- or Four-Year Itch
This CIO Magazine article by Stephanie Overby makes the point that to succeed, relationships require love and attention. That’s why CIOs—especially mid-market CIOs with limited resources—should factor in the costs of hand-holding when going offshore. The article also has some pretty good advice and steps to follow to make things work as best as possible.
... in 2005, PricewaterhouseCoopers found that half of the financial services executives it surveyed were dissatisfied with offshoring.
Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development
Martin Fowler writes about his experiences using agile development with an offshore team.
So far we've discovered that we can make it work, although the benefits are still open to debate.
How Offshore Outsourcing Failed Us
Published in Network Computing, October 16, 2003. The director of software systems at Life Time Fitness shares the company's experiences—and struggles--when it attempted to outsource work to a top Indian firm.
Even after the vendor fixed the "in scope" defects, the application was unusable. And fixing it meant it would be late and even more over-budget. At this point, we decided the best course was to take delivery of the application and overhaul the code ourselves.
Adventures in Offshoring: Global Success Stories
Published in Dr Dobb's Portal, January 2006. This section features three articles, including “Outsourcing QA” authored by our own Matt Pérez.
India's outsourcing industry is booming! The bad news? This has created very high turnover and a shortage of experienced engineers.
Offshore Outsource Savings Can Be Elusive, Survey Shows
Published in CIOInsight.com, July 15, 2005.
Enterprises that expect to reap hefty savings simply as a result of assumed lower employee costs provided by offshore IT outsourcing services will be sadly disappointed, according to a survey of more than 5,000 corporate executives around the globe.
Books at Amazon
Outsourcing Classics: books on Offshore, Nearshore and Homeshore Outsourcing.