Slashdot Mirror
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."
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 :-)
Even if one accepts the claim that the US is a privacy liability, that claim is orthogonal to whether other nations impede US services with protectionism — those two possibilities may coexist just fine. Despite this obvious fallacy the parent characterizes the latter as a `blatant lie' while citing nothing credible.
Please try not mod this nonsense up. I know we're supposed to indulge privacy outrage around here but the parent is crap. Find some other, less stupid malcontent to amplify.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
That strikes me as the top 5 reasons not to outsource anywhere.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Hmm. I'm usually the first one to point out mistaken beliefs about US superiority in general, or certainly in terms of privacy protection or civil rights.
I can't speak for Mexico. However, I don't believe i.e. India offers any privacy protection that the US does not. In fact, in most outsourcing hotspots around South or Central America or the Pac Rim, you not only have even fewer stated protections, but you are dealing with governments that are even less, shall we say, predictable. You also have to be concerned about how safe and easy it is to do business (with i.e. an outsourcing firm, hosting company) in places where the quality of the civil courts is not so great. And, let's be real - in many nations where IT outsourcing once boomed, the court system is more a theater for bribery than a forum for the practice of law. And then there's the well-documented danger of collusion between the state and large domestic companies, or even organized crime, to a degree that even the US still blushes at (and the US does not blush at much, especially these days)...
I did once investigate whether it was possible for an American to go to India in reverse of what normally happens in IT - to study there, or take an IT job there, either for several years or perhaps to emigrate. I came away with the impression that it would be harder as an American citizen to go there, than as an Indian citizen, to come here.
I think our trade and immigration policies are often ridiculous, but especially so when, in our era of "free movement of goods," the US doesn't even extract bilateral agreements on the free movement of people, after speaking with the relevant lobbyists to determine what the visa quotas should be. :)
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!