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I'm not sure how extensive they are or if TFA takes this into account, but it should be noted that all the Indian BPO majors have a presence in the Philippines.

I am a natve US citizen, Caucasian male. I worked for Wipro recently, and they are a very good company. They paid me competitive rates to what I would get from a US company, and had excellent benefits. Their US home office is in Sunnyvale California about two blocks from Google. If it wasn't for the fact that I was ready to get out of a job that had me living in airports and hotels, I would still be there today.

Most of what I did was to put an American face on what is basically an Indian company. Any major development was handed off to my counterparts in India where skilled labor is cheaper. I spent an enormous amount of time acting as an interpreter on conference calls for customers who could not understand English with an Indian accent. I also did a lot of requirements gathering because the language barrier made it a painful process for many of our customers. It really was a good job, and if you have the personality that will let you be a good traveling consultant I highly recommended Wipro.

So now that Windows doesn't have support for this and that software

What makes you think those systems aren't outsourced? Most of the back office stuff is outsourced, with the leading frontend people being in the US.

http://www.delhiprofessionals.com/bpoutsource.asp
http://www.wipro.com/webpages/bpo/index.htm . That lists HR and accounts outsourcing right there.

And of course these jobs aren't available to the greater majority of the population, especially to the Dalit (formerly known as "untouchable") segment.

Modern Indian organization (especially in IT) are having all the equal employment opportunities you see in any Western organization.

Can you prove a 'Dalit' is unfairly treated during recruitment at a company like INFOSYS or WIPRO?

'Dalits' (Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes) are having reservations for jobs in Indian Public sector organizations.

Also, we should not try to generalise India to comfortable sound bytes...the reality is far more complex.

Do you have an idea how much it costs to maintain their army of consultants and developers? These http://www.bearingpoint.com/guys, these http://www.accenture.com/guys, these http://www.eds.com/guys and last but not least your little ant army of Indians http://www.wipro.com/. Remember that they travel a lot, have to stay in hotels, eat, etc. This is not cheap. Viva la Outsourcing! Don't work there, but know someone who does. And it's chaotic. Thank God I don't have Bellsouth DSL.

During 1995 and 1996, TransQuest reengineered Delta's systems to migrate them from Hitachi mainframes running Natural, Adabas, and DB2 to an open systems environment. The new systems are written in C++ and access Sybase databases of reusable and distributed objects. The systems run primarily on Sun, HP and AT&T servers under UNIX with clients running under UNIX, MS-DOS, and Windows. The clients are connected to the servers over high bandwidth TCP/IP frame relay networks.

Job titles for the company's 1,100 computer professionals include Systems Engineer and Software Engineer 1 through 8. Staff members recently developed an aircraft weight balance system that can be accessed by pilots to determine how luggage and fuel have been distributed within the aircraft for balance during a flight. This system was developed in C++ on AT&T and HP UNIX servers and will be available on 40,000 devices to 2,000 users.

"an example of an external service provider that handles a wide range of back-office functions for the airlines. AFS handles sales, refund, traffic and cargo; performs fare audits; manages yields and revenues by performing departure and post-departure processing checks; books crews; deals with overbooked flights and wait-lists; adminsters frequent flyer programs; draws up flight navigation charts; such as landing or route facility charts; and provides customer care." This according to ebstrategy.com

I work 14-13 hours days - this is actually the time I spend in office. I work on saturdays (like today) and sunday afternoons as well.

Last year I got 5 days of vacation time .

I work here ... now you know why outsourcing works ?.

* Managers overcommit
* employees work their a$$es off
* ??? (random bugs, bad documentation)
* Profit !!!

Sadly my office is airconditioned with free coffee , while at home on a hot day is totally different... (oh, and I DON'T HAVE A LIFE).

Actually, I think more people that you might guess actually do care where their products come from... example: both my sister and all my friends will not buy american cars, and in fact, go out of the way to make sure the japanese cars they do buy have a VIN starting with "J", meaning they were built in Japan.

Wipro (indian outsourcer/contractor) is one of the few companies that is CMM level 5 rated for various functions of software development... maybe security and stability will actually improve with Microsoft's move?

In the end, it's all about the money... it's not like M$ doesn't have enough.. it's that the education system in the US doesn't compare to the top of the line in India (statistically speaking, it makes sense, top(x) of 1 billion will be better than top(x) of 300 milion)

>check if America was with India before last 3 years?
They have been, through the World Bank. The US bought peace in that part of the world.


This is the biggest joke I have ever heard. Money != peace, like your Saudi allies can testify. India is a non-aligned nation. America is a friend. Not an ally.


>Indian s/w industry is not restricted to code monkeys.
That might be true. Could you point it out what innovation they have done? No marketting stuff please.


Put lot of americans out of business. In 30 years, Indians would ask the same about american programmers. Frankly, give a peaceful country to live in, give tons of research money and give patent protectionism - only a moronic race cannot innovate. It just needs a little time for the large scale innovation to come by. Remember- India has been an independent nation for a little over 50 years unlike US, which has been independent for more than 200 yrs.


>US DOES NOT FORM THE BULK OF WIPRO BUSSINESS.

I was going to check this out since they should specifiy this in their financial reports but then I came across this;
Click on Canada/US I got a good laugh out of it.


This is a perfect example of how people at slashdot distort facts. As you said, marketing is different from development and the clientele a company has. Its pretty obvious that the offices listed in there are mostly marketing offices.
If you truly bother to know about Wipro, go here .

>check if America was with India before last 3 years?

They have been, through the World Bank. The US bought peace in that part of the world.

>Indian s/w industry is not restricted to code monkeys.

That might be true. Could you point it out what innovation they have done? No marketting stuff please.

>US DOES NOT FORM THE BULK OF WIPRO BUSSINESS.

I was going to check this out since they should specifiy this in their financial reports but then I came across this;
Click on Canada/US I got a good laugh out of it.

Here are some helpful URLs on growing the company:

Tata Consulting
WiPro

One would assume that the outsourcing will give the Indians an edge for a while at least. Well, let's dispell some myths here...

Wipro is an SEI CMM level 5 firm that is among the top 5 IT players in India, and guess what? Their consumer products division makes more profit than their IT division.

[quote src= http://rediff.com/money/2003/jul/22wipro.htm ]
It is consumer care and lighting, which recorded a return on capital employed of 86 per cent, compared to 41 per cent for global IT services and products in the last quarter (April-June)!
[/quote]

How long do you think the Indians are going to find IT profitable?

[quote src= http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.03/bangalore_ pr.html ]
Wipro Limited, which through its information-technology division employs 6,500 software workers worldwide and grossed $310 million last year.
[...]
Premji owns the majority stake in Wipro and has a personal net worth of Rs392 billion - more than $9 billion.
[/quote]

At $400 million a year [gross], how long does it take to accumulate $9 billion?

"IT" is profitable, yes, but not __THAT__ profitable. Most jobs will be shipped to China or some place else, as soon as they get upto speed on English.

India is looking to be a research hub, and move up the value chain. The call centers will move to Phillipines, the IT to China or Eastern Europe.

Time to see beyond the borders, there's lots more to this than meets the eye...

Biotech 'outsourcing' has already begun. At least to India. It's being majorly hyped here as the next big job creator (after IT). There are quite a few companies, including a traditional IT service provider expanding into this area.

Y'know, you're absolutely bang-on. A lot of Indian programmers are very young (and not very experienced) ... in fact Wipro devs got flamed for being clueless n00bs while working on Gnome and Metacity for Sun.

But the reason Wipro (and a lot of other Indian companies) will succeed is (a) great middle level management and (b) amazing marketing.

In particular, Wipro (and Infosys and Tata Consultancy) have drones working for them at the bottom. Most of them are fresh non-CS engineers (e.g. Mech or EE, not many Indian CS undergrads who love IT/CS would work at jobs like these) or folk with 2-5 years of experience. Nothing to write home about, nothing to get scared about. Except the numbers. Because we're talking about companies which put together have over 80,000 employees. Out of those, they can easily get amazingly talented middle management (project leads, project managers, practice managers, delivery heads) that's tech savvy and not PHB-like. *This* are their hidden backroom strength.

Offshore development houses like Cognizant, Satyam Computer Services, and Wipro Technology have been posting 20%+ YOY growth since at least the mid-nineties and they're all doing embedded stuff. In his recent book ("Straight from the Gut"), Jack Welch admits that although GE built and abandoned manufacturing plants in India (for Plastics, Lighting, and Aircraft Engines, I believe), they're still growing their software development center there.

For the humour challenged, that was SARCASM.

Seriously though, my sympathies are with GNOME - and my desktop with KDE.