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Mexican Hotel Chain Outsources IT To US
cweditor writes "Grupo Posadas has five data centers supporting more than 100 hotels and other lines of business, but it's moving almost all of those operations to a service provider in Texas. Could cloud service providers help the U.S. become a destination for tech outsourcing instead of an exporter of tech jobs? One stumbling block: The U.S. finds itself on the receiving end of protectionist legislation in other countries that discourages use of non-domestic IT service providers, says the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation."
Todays offer, host in USA, get free backup from NSA.
Only problem is getting back the copies once the cloud service crashes/vanishes underneath.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe...
"Ubuntu" - an African word meaning "Slackware is too hard for me."
"The US finds itself on the receiving end of protectionist legislation in other countries that discourages use of non-domestic IT service providers"
That is a misrepresentation. most country I know of which view the US cloud service warrily, do because of the privacy protection of their citizen. One cannot guarantee any privacy protection once the data is on US soil. Neitehr can one guanrantee that the US will not subponea the data. THAT is the reason some country do not want their cloud data in the US, or outside their own juridiction for what it matters.
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Look, its fairly easy to get into the "cloud" business as the only barriers are financial, not technical.
Other than power, It costs about the same to run a data center with 200 cores as it costs to run one with 500 cores.
You might hire one more tech support person. Maybe. Probably not.
There will be few jobs outsourced to Texas, other than janitorial ones, because the hosting company
is only going to be running the machines, the Mexican hotel chain will still be managing them and
running their own booking software.
They are shedding physical plant, not jobs.
What they surrender is control. If the data center is accused of hosting some IP pirate nodes, the Mexican hotel
chain could find their servers are grabbed by the FBI in some heavy handed Anti-Pirate operation.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Top 5 reasons not to outsource to US:
5. Can't trust those Americans with your data.
4. You'll lose control over your infrastructure.
3. Low prices are temporary and will increase as the global economy continues to balance
2. Perceived cost savings are more than offset by the additional cost of having to spec everything out to the point where you're better off doing it yourself.
1. You won't be able to understand them when you call for support.
and they outsource it to India!
With the U.S.'s non-enforcement of immigration law, the Texas datacenter could be staffed with Mexican citizens anyway.
Top 5 reasons not to outsource from US:
5. Can't trust those Foreigners with your product.
4. You'll lose control over your infrastructure.
3. Low prices are temporary and will increase as the global economy continues to balance
2. Perceived cost savings are more than offset by the additional cost of having to spec everything out to the point where you're better off doing it yourself.
1. You won't be able to understand them when you call for support.
Years ago Dilbert had a strip where they outsourced to country A, who outsourced to company B, and so forth until it was eventually outsourced back to themselves. Its finally happened :-)
Or: workforce procurement trolling... like a boss!
Of course this get better when they call the support number and hear:
"Hello... I.T. support center. This is Joe-Bob, uh, I mean, uh, Pedro. How can I help ya'all?"
So eventually will emigrants from the USA also be taking over the landscaping jobs?
This is not the first sign of this. A few years back a large Indian Call Center company bought a U.S. Call Center company because they could not meet the demand for call center workers in India.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I am signed up for a Japanese company that outsources weird international requests to translators all over the world. Whoever is qualified, no matter where they are in the world, will do it. I've translated documents for topics ranging from industrial refrigerants on shipping vessels to the future of feminine hygiene products in India.
(Globally, feminine hygiene product makers are excited about the huge emerging market of India. But for now, most Indian women have never heard of a tampon and think that they have a horrible cancer that causes them to bleed every few weeks. Married couples may have no idea how to make a baby, and consult witch doctors.)
No, thats the only point why they get shitty jobs there.
This has more to do with the high cost, low reliability and abysmal customer support of the telecommunications monopoly(TelMex) in Mexico. In addition commercial electricity usage is subsidized in most of the USA, while in Mexico very high commercial rates are used to subsidize much lower residential electricity usage. As many others have noted there are no jobs created with this move. This actually will ends up costing USA tax payers money since they are the ones ultimately paying for the subsidies to the ISP's and Electric utilities.
Just for the record I'm and American that lives in Mexico.
Outsourcing to texas? That just means the illegals in TX will get more money to send back to the mexico instead of putting it into our economy. Big deal.
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A lot of Mexican businesses are moving to the U.S., especially here in Houston, because of the rising crime rate in Mexico.
I remember reading in Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" that the US always in-sourced more jobs than we ever out-sourced. And that all of the negative media against out-sourced jobs was misguided and uninformed. Maybe this is the case after all?
One reason to outsource support to India:
The support people's accent relieves tension.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
IT jobs are *flooding* out of the US. Every now and then a few pitiful jobs come to the US. And some bozo makes a huge fuss over it.
stro said most countries have an equivalent Patriot Act law, and some, including Canada and Australia, allow businesses to turn over data voluntarily to a government agency. A U.S. company would viola.,,,,,
Lies... Canadian companies often don't have these protections spelled out in contracts because they're already in federal law (PIPEDA), where there are MUCH tougher penalties then a contract dispute with hard to quantify damages would have. With US companies the only protection is what's in the contract.
Also of note, in Canada, the information protection applies to all "Identifiable person"s, in the US it applies to US citizens only, or to a party to the contract.
First, He led Mexicana (one of the national airlines) to bankrupcy:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/04/business/la-fi-mexicana-bankruptcy-20100804
Then he suggested that the word "Mexico" to be dropped as a brand for tourism. And finally, Grupo Posas is in serious financial problems.
I say don't take anything from this guy as an example of good business practice.
I believe that Ikea outsources manufacturing to the US because of the low wages and benefits. Interesting that the US is a third world country in such ways.
First, He led Mexicana (one of the national airlines) to bankrupcy:
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/04/business/la-fi-mexicana-bankruptcy-20100804
Then he suggested that the word "Mexico" to be dropped as a brand for tourism. And finally, Grupo Posas is in serious financial problems.
I say don't take anything from this guy as an example of good business practice.
Be that as it may
1. There is no claim that says what Grupo Posadas is doing in this particular case (or in any case in general) is a good business practice.
2. The discussion is about a foreign firm moving most of its IT operations to a US-based cloud provider, and the implications therein on US services and/or data privacy.
I know this is /. (where argument consistency/coherence means squat) but c'mon.
More on topic, when companies "move" their "IT operations" to US-based cloud providers, it simply means they are giving up hosting their own infrastructure. Their local IT staff *might* get downsized, maybe not. But nothing of this implies that jobs are coming back (or moving) to US soil. Sysadmins will remain in Mexican. Local business ops will remain in Mexican soil. Pretty much every existing job will re-main as-is.
I mean, let's think about it. US companies nowadays move most of their infrastructure to some cloud provider hosted on, say, Heroku, Amazon or RackSpace (either just a raw virtual space or a virtual app stack.) That gets followed by massive IT Ops/sysadmins/dba admin layoffs, keeping just a core group (at most) supervising a much larger group of support staff in some other cheaper part of the globe.
Likewise a Mexican corporation would not outsource its operations to the US after moving its IT infrastructure to a US-based cloud/platform provider. It is not cost effective. Furthermore, it would not outsource it, say, to India or the Philippines because of language barriers. Outsourcing services around the globe use English as the business language. In Latin America, unlike in Europe or most of Asia, businesses are solely conducted in Spanish or Portuguese - we are horrendously monolingual, more so than Americans. American companies (and European/Japanese companies to a lesser degree) can freely move their operations around the world because English proficiency of some sort is used as a business language.
Not so with Mexican companies (or Latin American companies in general). So any reporter who thinks this could mean a back-to-the-land job migration of sorts is seriously mistaken, uninformed and ignorant.
Those Americans, cant even speak proper Spanish.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
As it has been proven that Safe Harbour really isn't, any EU organisation that uses a US data provider is potentially on their way to a violation of Data Protection.
Not that that matters much, the Irish Data Protection people have already shown comprehensively that that isn't a real problem :)
Insert
Plain and simple. That cloud business is making me sick. A server is cheap. Store and encrypt your shit and don't use the Internet for storage. It was not designed for that purpose.
The US will now sub-source the contract to India. :) More profits!!!