Oracle To Add R&D Centers In China

stoborrobots writes "Reuters is reporting that the big O is planning to open new R&D centres in china. Initially aiming at the domestic Chinese market, there is potential to resell the technologies developed beyond the borders... Is this the next wave of outsourcing?"

Comments

Workaround for US export controls?

[arc.light]

The US has some fairly daunting nuclear non-proliferation export controls on software and hardware to nations such as China. Larry Ellison, a heavy contributor to the Democratic Party, might be encountering difficulty in obtaining the necessary export licenses, so maybe this is a workaround for those export controls.

Re:Workaround for US export controls?

[cL0h]

Even more relevant is the fact that China have strict controls on imported computer software but are much more lenient on software produced within the country since the company involved can be more closely regulated.
This is the reason why my company has forty development positions available at the moment in China and an apparent hiring freeze in Europe and North America.

Re:Simple Question, Simple Answer

[tarunthegreat2]

Not really. Most people think that China will be the "Next India" when it comes to IT/BPO, but there are lots of reasons why they won't be.

1. Language. Indian languages come from Sanskrit, which according to all credible sources is a sister language to Ancient Greek and Latin (Dental in English refers to Teeth. Tooth in french is "Dent". In Hindi, the equivalent is "Dant" which is pronounced almost like the french word. The same applies to counting and numbers. This, coupled with 250 years of British Rule, means that Indians pick up English/Western European languages a lot faster than Chinese (poor accents and grammar aside).

2. Culture. Chinese people as a rule are more homogenous than Indians, and by all anecdotal evidence are much more disciplined. This mindset means that replicating a manufacturing process comes very easy to them. Life in India, however consists of "Jugad". This is a hindi word which can loosely be translated as "Improvisation" or to a person in the CS field it would be called a "Hack". As much as we'd like to pretend that programming and development are simple ordered processes, we all know this is far from the truth. There are many solutions which require some improvisation, and this again means that Indians are better suited to software.

3. Government. India is a democratic republic, following a parliamentary system based on the British system. It has the three branches (legislative, executive, judicial) that are familiar to most (Western and) other democracies. China is more of a pseudo-communist/totalitarian-capitalist. This makes it easier for businessmen attempting to outsource, as they can operate in a framework they are familiar with. (In practise, this hasn't worked out, because India has not been going out of its way to attract business like China was doing...it is definitely easier to make fast decisions quickly in a communist country than in a democracy.

Anyway those are my two cents. Thank you for your time

Alanguagewithoutspaces

[Underholdning]

If you've ever had to create an Oracle application with support for Chinese you know that it's quite an ordeal. The core of the database just isn't suited for a language that, among other things, doesn't have spaces.
It makes perfectly sense to open an R&D department in China, since there's a huge market there, and of course Oracle wants to fully support chinese.

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Re:Simple Question, Simple Answer

[JBdH]

Although I agree with you, I have to say that I can't agree with the second point you mention. China is not a very homgenous country. It is true that the Han chinese - the top dogs - try to stress homogenity in China, partly to cover up ther (former) imperialistic behaviour. Truth is there is a huge diversity in ethnicity : turkish (uygurs), persian (parsi), arabic, tibetan, nepali, mongoloid (in Manchuria, Inner Mongolia) etc. etc. Also in religious sense I guess there are as many different religions in China as there are in India (muslims, Nestorians, zarathustrians, animists etc. etc.). Again these religious minorities are considered either futile barbarians or a threat to the stablitity of China as a whole by the Chinese (han-)government.

Re:Simple Question, Simple Answer

[Skankmofo]

As an american living and working in china for the last six months, I have to say that you are generally right, but you forget one thing...there are a significant number of Chinese who immigrated to the US/canada/england, usually after going to college there, and are now moving back to China because of the economic opportunities and the fact that many of their family and friends are still here in china. Working for a company like Oracle, or any foreign company, they can get paid maybe somewhat below US salary, but since everything is so cheap here, they can usually effectively double their salary in purchase power parity, and have more opportunities to move into manager and high positions in the company.

It is very true that chinese are generally rather homogenous, and I know many engineering and other students who routinely copy each others' assignments. But another thing you have to remember is that there are 1.3 billion people here and if .5% of those people are not homogenous that is still a shitload of people.

As far as the language, that's a big issue here, and their english is generally pretty bad, but as more and more students go abroad for college (since a lot more can afford it now) and that literally every chinese person i know is constantly trying to improve their english, that will become less of a factor.