Slashdot Mirror
Mumbai Bombings Give Outsourcing Community Pause
theodp writes "eWeek reports that the big fear of offshore outsourcing customers has become a reality: a major bombing attack in an outsourcing hub. In the wake of the attack, companies are considering their resources and preparedness. Despite understandable fears, people on the ground don't seem to think these latest attacks will have a long-term effect on the growth of India's tech sector." From the article: "The terrorist attack in Mumbai--and conflict between Israel and Lebanon for that matter--raise a series of questions for companies sourcing technology globally. Do you know the disaster recovery plans of your offshore services provider? Are their plans integrated with yours? And how prepared are these providers? "
How is outsourcing any different from sub contracting within your own country in this respect? Quoth the article:
Quite.
Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
No, it raises a very good question.
Are they ready for it? You can't just pick any non-industrialized nation, point and say "this is where our billion dollar software project will be made."
I'm not saying smack about India [cuz frankly I've never been there] but if the region isn't ready for the business in terms of economic, academic and political stability then maybe it isn't wise to DEPEND on them for your business?
It's one thing to ADD to your team with developers from other nations, e.g. setup a firm in Ireland or HK or something. It's another alltogether to depend solely on foreign assets.
Frankly I like the idea of spreading jobs around the globe, but only if the recipients are actually qualified to do the job. And while I like beating up on the average lame india post [see comp.lang.c] I'm not foolish enough to think that North Americans are all that much better in that regard.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Why do we always outsource to places that are stuck in eternal struggles. Seriously, when was the last time Iceland or New Zeland had some terrorist plot or civil war ensue.
Two hundred innocent people are killed and people are worried that future events like these might cause an IT outage?
That's seems about on a par with worrying about doing business with Cantor Fitzgerald because they had an office located in the World Trade Center.
And what, exactly, makes people think that India is going to be more subject to future terrorist attacks than... well, you fill in that sentence any way you please.
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All major American, and certain European cities are under the threat of bombs, and not just normal bombs at that. You have the first world luxury of choosing from biological, chemical, nuclear and neurotic weapons. So why don't people speak about the threat to all technological and commercial sourcing?
/.? Are you all softbellies scared of getting outsourced?
So why the fuck is the bombing in Mumbai so important to
Mark me flamebait, lazy overpaid supremacist!
-clueless
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Completely right there. This is just self interested posturing, not a genuine concern. Besides which we don't usually talk about the Israeli IT industry as 'outsourcing'.
Many of the people who flame endlessly about outsourcing are the same people who flame endlessly about libertarianism and how great the free market is.
What do slashdotters tell the people whose clerical jobs are being replaced by the systems they are developing? There is a bizare doublespeak here: Outsourcing bad, automation good. Historically IT people have been really good at protecting their own job security while making everyone else's job insecure.
Given the state of the IT job market I have a hard time feeling sorry for folk being outsourced. There are plenty of IT jobs around - if you actually have the skills that are in demand. And that should not be a problem if you really are worth the prices IT people expect.
The people who have difficulty getting a new position are the folk without formal qualifications and without a depth of knowledge in a useful field. Back in the dotcom boom I came across a consultant 'programmer' who did not know C, Fortran or Java. The only 'programming language' he knew was Delphi.
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Come of folks. So the world's largest democratic country with the world's largest population of English speaking citizens has one city bombed and the US is going to rethink its direction to outsource technology workers there? Nope!
In fact, many of the export centers are not in the city center and were unaffected by this event. Knowing many Indians, those that were will be back up and running in no time flat no matter what it takes.
Now, there may be reasons to rethink outsourcing such as low productivity, higher costs, poor quality of work, and customer relation issues but this is not one of them.
The best wishes of many people in the US go out to every Indian and we stand in solidarity with the many many millions of peace loving, free citizens of that nation.
not industrialized != politically unstable. look at uruguay, it's a fucking haven.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Tom, this problem is not about outsourcing, remember there were firms caught up in the 9/11 attacks whos disaster recovery plan was to store important documents in the other tower.
You are right that companies should spread and test their disaster recovery and ensure that whatever one branch or department has, the others have access to in a disaster (even if its locked up in the company vaults around the world).
We have had terrorist bombings (and other more mundane disasters) come along and wipe out entire populations and companies and I am sure that there will be more, whether its India or the North pole we need to be vigilant.
liqbase
My first reaction to this was "I wonder how this will affect IT outsourcing?"
My second reaction was shame that that should be my first reaction, when I have friends and colleagues with family there.
Personally, I don't think this should have a practical impact on outsourcing decisions. India is a stable democracy; war may stir ethnic and religious resentment, but I don't see things changing overnight in a way that affects business. And even at intolerable levels, terrorist attacks have almost no actuarial significance.
On the other hand, China is frightening. It's not longer precisely accurate to call it a totalitarian state, but politically it is still a one party, non-democratic state. Mature democracies have a kind of dynamic stability, where individuals and parties change, but politics and policy don't shift that dramatically. Systems based on the authority of a single group may be superficially stable, but they are vulnerable to individuals or groups of individuals being replaced, or even just changing their minds. Put the nation under stress, and you could well have an ultra-ideological hard liner becoming supreme leader.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yea... I am from India and this is the worst kind of FUD I have seen. Terrorist attacks form a much smaller risk then fire, floods and other hazards. A city capable of dealing with those can pretty much handle any such terrorist emergencies. This article is pure FUD.
Maybe New Orleans is a nice safe place. Of course the San Andreas fault is never going to crack so California is fine. But I like the weather in Florida so that could be a good choice.
So a question: Where in the world is politically stable, economically stable, is free (so far) of catastrophic natural disasters and as a bonus has a decent climate?
At this point, what nation can you really rely on for "economic, academic and political stability"? There were terrorist arrests in Toronto... cue Jon Stewart on the people who hate Canada: "Saying `I hate Canada' is like saying `I hate toast'." No matter what type of bread you are though, it seems someone is out to get you. It seems increasingly clear that you can't rely on anyone to provide a completely safe environment, and concentrating all of your assets in one location is an invitation to disaster.
Nobody panicked. There was no chaos. There were no riots.
Maybe you guys are used to it. But *I* wouldn't rely on a country in which it is normal to see bombs blow up once in a while to handle important data for my company. Seems logical, but I guess some will call that racism. Hence my posting as an AC. Sorry.
Your attempt at irony is in extremely poor taste, even for a Slashdot nerd.
The peoples of London, Madrid and New York were murdered at random by monsters who came to those places from distant lands where it is common to settle minor disputes by horrific acts of violence. The peoples of London, Madrid, and New York had learned from their history the futility of attempting to settle disputes through mass murder. They developed civilized methods of conflict resolution like fair court systems. They restrained themselves from mass murder in ways that are completely unknown to the subhumans who came to these cities from the disfunctional lands with the intention of genocidal slaughter.
The resulting actions after suffering horrible murder by the citizens of London, Madrid, and New York against the peoples who come from disfunctional cultures are not racist or discriminatory, but reasonable and rational acts of self-defense from the people who come to their cities with the intent of murder. It is sad that the good, law-abiding, and civilized peoples who came to the great cities of civilization in order to escape from the madness of disfuctional societies suffer in the West due to the actions of monsters.
But, it is the responsibility of the good, law-abiding, and civilized peoples from the disfuctional lands to seperate the monsters from their own society when they arrive in the civilized world. If the civilized people of a foreign culture can not or will not isolate and neutralize the monsters who live in their community, then they all will bear responsibility for the crimes that these monsters commit against the rest of the citizens. The entire community will suffer. That is the way that the world works.
The citizens of the cities that have suffered from the crimes that subhumans commit are not responsible for their inability to tell monsters from civilized people among those have come to their cities from distant lands.
is poor, desparate men and women with nothing to lose. Take someone, give them a job, a family and a future and see how eager they are to plant bombs on trains. That said, in 20 years when America's job market is flooded with 30 million+ (now legal) immigrants working for $5.15/hr, india and china's industrialization has drivin gas up to $10/gallon and a loaf of bread is $5-$10 dollars, expect to see random bombings and shootings here too.
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Just another example of the high costs- physical, economic, psychic- of having a large Muslim population in your midst. Israel suffers from it for dispossesing the Palestinian people- mainly the Muslim flotsam and jetsam of imperial Turkey, resettled in Judea from Egypt, Circassia, and the Balkans during the Ottoman Empire's slow-motion collapse. Yet what of India, the victim of 1400 years of continual jihad aggression during which millions of Hindus were slaughtered or enslaved, tens of thousands of temples and monuments destroyed, and in the modern age two large sections of it carved out to make homelands for its invaders? Yet what did it do to deserve this enemy from without (Pakistan and to a lesser extent Bangladesh) and within (150 million Indian Muslim "citizens") besides succumbing in the end to continuous jihad aggression? And why are Western countries voluntarily replicating the same conditions for themselves by allowing millions of Third World Muslim colonist-invaders into their midsts?
Putting aside emotional reactions which would cause me to make comments like: "people are dying and yet you are thinking about IT infrastructures"... (I am an Indian, and have lots of relatives and friends in Mumbai). I know that life went on after the blasts. I know that the big IT companies in India are world leaders when it comes to having processes and procedures concerning their business. (I am in the IT industry myself). In my experience, most of the clients that I have worked with have had little or no processes themselves. So, it is unfair to think of this in a light where India (the country being out-sourced to) needs to have back-up plans, and disaster recovery procedures. Anyway, I think that the whole world is fair game for terrorist activities (terrorists being what they are), so we should be discussing about these procedures, plans, etc. at a global level. - Vaibhav