Slashdot Mirror


Immigration Reform May Spur Software Robotics

dcblogs writes "The Senate's immigration bill may force the large offshore outsourcing firms to reduce their use of H-1B visa-holding staff, forcing them to hire more local workers and raising their costs. But one large Indian firm, Infosys, will try to offset cost increases with software robotics. Infosys recently announced a partnership with IPsoft, a New York-based provider of autonomic IT services. With IPsoft's tools, work that is now done by human beings, mostly Level 1 support, could be done by a software machine. Infosys says that IPsoft tools can 'reduce human intervention.' More colorfully, Chandrashekar Kakal, global head of Infosys's business IT services, told the Times of India, that 'what robotics did for the auto assembly line, we are now doing for the IT engineering line.' James Slaby, a research director of HFS Research who has been following the use of autonomics closely, wrote in a recent report that the IPsoft partnership may help Infosys 'reap fatter margins by augmenting and replacing expensive, human IT support engineers with cheaper, more accurate, efficient automated processes,' and by improving service delivery."

8 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Re:programming is not a prodcution line by SJHillman · · Score: 4, Funny

    Judging from the summary, they're looking to replace support more than production. I'm pretty sure this isn't a new idea... all you need is a cassette tape playing "Have you tried turning it off and on again" on a loop.

  2. Wipro and Infosys two companies that should die by Virtucon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Both Wipro and Infosys are the worst in terms of H1-B visa abuse and should not be allowed to operate in this country.

    http://profit.ndtv.com/news/industries/article-us-senator-accuses-infosys-wipro-tcs-of-abusing-h-1b-visas-321282

    But, unfortunately they're connected with Washington's elite and throw money around in DC to keep things like the H1-B program alive. Remember that during the next election cycle.

    --
    Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
  3. Re:programming is not a prodcution line by h4rr4r · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Which is why 90% of the time support for something is totally worthless.

    Verizon wireless was rejecting some of the SMS we send our own employees. There is no one we could talk to who had any idea what to do. No customer facing person had any ability to tell us why they started doing this or if there was a process around it.

  4. Re:Bound to work... by Penguinisto · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ironically, it'd likely work just as well as hiring Indian help-desk staff.

    I suspect Infosys (an Indian company) will likely end up stabbing their own jobs market in the gut with this one, should it take off.

    --
    Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
  5. Re:Bound to work... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    To paraphrase:

    go away, I have replaced you with a shell script. A small one.

  6. Verizon is a bit of a special case... by Penguinisto · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you think that's bad, try getting help on a server issue when you're not a Verizon customer.

    Back in 2006, I was working for a DoD contractor, and discovered that our order emails to suppliers were bouncing as spam if it went to a Verizon address. We tried for a solid week to call everyone we could possibly find at Verizon that could help, but either got stonewalled, referred to some useless person, or (most often) shoved into the standard customer tech support queue. Mostly we were treated like either a social-engineering attempt, an idiot, or something similar.

    Thing is, my employer ran the EMALL website, which all armed forces used to order anything which wasn't an actual weapon. Our index was bigger than Amazon's

    Finally, I gave up and spoke with the managers at DLA (Defense Logistics Agency), laying out the problem to date. We then put out a system-wide notice to all DoD suppliers that if they wanted to sell something to the military, they'd damned well better use something other than a Verizon email account. Two weeks later, Verizon came out of the blue, desperately calling us asking what they could do to help us out. Turns out they weren't fully RFC-compliant at the time; they fixed it pretty quickly once they realized that a lot of their DoD-supplier customers were suddenly asking them how much the contract ETFs came to.

    Sad part is, if my employer was some tiny company in BFE, there would likely still be a problem with the damned thing.

    --
    Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
  7. Re:programming is not a prodcution line by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 5, Funny

    Who holds the copyright on that phrase?

    I first thought of Edison, but then it occurred to me that this was actually Tesla's approach...

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  8. Re:Software Robotics?!? by GameboyRMH · · Score: 5, Funny

    At our office we use software hardware. It really saves on the hardware hardware costs.

    --
    "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel