outsourcing

Forget Chennai and Mumbai. The outsourcing hubs of tomorrow will be in Guadalajara and Gdansk.

An eclectic mix of 31 cities worldwide will challenge today's best-known outsourcing centers in China and India, according to a new report from professional services giant KPMG.

Faced with overburdened telecommunications infrastructure and overstretched labor markets in traditional offshore locations, these cities are among the alternatives that should be considered by companies, the report says.

The report found that the new cities in the Asia-Pacific region offer lower costs, younger populations, and government incentives such as easy work permits, while those in Europe, Middle … Read more

India's traditional outsourcing centers appear to be falling out of favor.

According to Pierre Audoin Consultants, outsourcing companies are increasingly looking outside Bangalore and Mumbai when choosing bases in which to set up shop.

PAC found that while India remains popular with the top 50 outsourcing companies--11 of the 49 new offshoring delivery centers set up in 2008 were based in the country--vendors are progressively creating more bases in cities such as Chennai, Noida, Hyderabad, and Pune.

According to Nick Mayes, a senior consultant at PAC, conditions for outsourcers in Bangalore and Mumbai are no longer as favorable as … Read more

Satyam Computer Services announced Wednesday its founder and chairman, B. Ramalinga Raju, has resigned, following an admission that he inflated its financial performance.

Satyam, one of India's six largest IT outsourcing companies, counts such Fortune 500 companies as Sony among its customers.

The company said it received a letter from its chairman on Wednesday, outlining some of the accounting irregularities and his resignation.

While Satyam did not include a copy of the letter in its announcement, a report in The Wall Street Journal contains a copy of the letter.

Raju noted in his letter that Satyam's balance sheet … Read more

New contenders are emerging to challenge the BRIC countries' dominance of the offshoring market.

While India was the "undisputed leader," followed by China and other BRIC countries Russia and Brazil, research firm Gartner's list this year of the top 30 offshoring destinations showed Mexico, Poland, and Vietnam pushing their way up to take them on.

Ian Marriott, research vice president at Gartner, said these countries would be seeking to take advantage of the credit crisis to capitalize on organizations' drive to save costs.

The four countries that dropped out from last year's Top 30 were Northern … Read more

More than a year ago, Pasadena Now's editor and publisher, James Macpherson, caused a minor media stir after hiring a couple of reporters in India to write up the Webcast meetings of the local city council for his online newspaper

In the year-plus since his decision, many of Macpherson's peers have had an increasingly hard time of it. (In a speech delivered earlier this month, Rupert Murdoch warned of even worse times ahead -- in no small part because of the emergence of the Internet and the haphazard way in which publishers have responded to the shift in … Read more

I asked my colleagues in frog design's Shanghai studio about their perspective on the current economic downturn, and here's what they wrote back:

"The US may be the initiator of this round of global economic recession but it may not be the final payer. China's economy is about to suffer as well - and in more ways than one.

And yet, the people who have been around the longest know not to pay too much attention to one-direction comments. They know that the sufferers will always shout much louder than the beneficiaries. They also know that … Read more

Indian outsourcing companies are likely to be affected by the economic downturn in the U.S., an Indian trade body has warned.

The National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) said on Tuesday that the continuing "turmoil" in the U.S. financial markets would be likely to have a negative effect on Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) contracts, in the short term.

"The Indian IT-BPO sector is an integral part of the global ecosystem and is likely to be impacted in the short-term (two to three quarters), as clients become cautious in their discretionary spending and … Read more

IT services provider Unisys announced Tuesday it has begun a search for a new CEO, as the company struggles to right its operations.

Joseph McGrath, who has served as the CEO for the past three years, will step down by year's end. He will, however, continue to oversee the company's daily operations until a successor is found.

"On behalf of the board, I would like to thank Joe for his nine years of loyal service to the company. We wish him well in his future endeavors," Henry Duques, Unisys' chairman, said in a statement.

Unisys was … Read more

India is starting to assert itself as a center of high-tech innovation, according to a study set to be released Monday morning.

A talent pool of engineers working in research and development that barely existed 15 years ago has blossomed to 250,000 people, more than 140,000 just in Bangalore, said Vamsee Tirukkala, co-founder of the consulting company Zinnov, which conducted the study. That's second only to Silicon Valley. And as Indian ex-patriots return home and new college graduates stay home rather than read to regions such as Silicon Valley, as they have in the past, those numbers … Read more