Cowboys and Indians
posted by Glen Stidolph in Outsourcing |
American media sources cry FOUL as Indian firms begin increasing IT employment in the US.
Just as the US media machine started getting up a head of steam against those pesky highly skilled and highly educated Indians who are working for a bowl of rice per week and stealing all of the American IT workers jobs, they go and start employing Americans IT workers…in America.
The New Jersey based infrastructure firm Infocrossing has been purchased by Wipro for $600m. Wipro is one of the ‘big three’ technology firms in India employing some 72,000 engineers. Infocrossing manages technical infrastructure and has five data centres in the US, providing services to such esteemed clients as the Reader’s Digest group, so you can’t get any more Americana than that.
The first thing Infocrossing has done is to assure existing clients that the management team is not changing, the service is not changing, and the name is not changing. In fact, from the sound of it there is not much changing at all – apart from the fact that Infocrossing now has access to Wipro’s enormous resources, IT Engineering skills that came from US Universities and were then honed in the WIPRO offices in India, as well as their lean manufacturing practices and thought leadership in six sigma fault reduction methods which will have the American IT engineers worried that it may show just how complacent American companies had become and perhaps this may be a major source of why many American jobs in this, and other industries are being outsourced.
The similarities with the US Automotive industry are there for all to see, Just as ‘cheap’ foreign imported cars were to blame for redundancies in the US Automotive industry, and not that US manufactured cars were expensive due to the manufacturers over burdening themselves with high salaries, expansive pension plans, welfare benefits, high wastage and poor supply chain practices.
We are now in the position where Japanese automakers now operate more manufacturing plants in the US, than their erstwhile competitors, teaching them how to implement lean manufacturing practices and demonstrating that it is possible to manufacture successfully in a higher cost economy.
In the same way that Toyota has given the US auto industry a shot in the arm, the Indian technology players are now in a position to export back to the US. Toyota creates jobs in Japan and Toyota creates jobs in the US; now it’s possible to see how Wipro could be spoken of as a large employer of US people.
