Resources to help start-ups, and small and medium business better understand outsourcing to India.

BPO is leading way for the IT sector’s return to normalcy amid the recession. Incidentally, many of the first time offshorers are turning to Indian vendors to take on their projects.

The Wall Street Journal started a three part series with Ramon Roy, widely considered one of the pioneers of the outsourcing industry in India.  The first piece is a call for the India outsourcing industry to reinvent itself.
Roy’s thesis is that with declining labor arbitrage and evolving demands in the market, India needs to innovate [...]

The massive fraud at Satyam, one of India’s largest IT & BPO services companies, is now being called India’s Enron.  Details are still coming out, but it appears the chairman, B. Ramaligna Raju, has been cooking the books for years and had generated fictitious assets of over $1 billion on its balance sheet.
Standards of corporate [...]

The Indian education system plays a critical role in helping India maintain its position as one of the top offshore outsourcing destinations. The education system in India has a long history and has a number of strong points, but it is straining under high demand for skilled workers. US & European firms in or planning long-term outsourcing deals in India need to keep an eye on developments in the sector. Progress in education means continued low-cost, high-skilled resources in India, but stagnation will reignite wage inflation and lead to further scarcity of managers and higher skill workers.

It is well known that web design can be completed in India for a fraction of the cost of hiring a US or Western European firm. The key question of most buyers is can one get comparable quality in India. In most cases, the answer is yes but the skills of designers in India vary greatly and buyers need to be more diligent about the vendor selection process.

The direct cost of outsourcing services in India is primarily determined by employee compensation, but taxes also play a role.  In most cases taxes are not directly paid by the end customer, but are absorbed into a vendors cost structure and are passed on in their pricing.  Just because you won’t always see taxes on [...]

The direct cost of outsourcing services is largely driven by employee compensation, but other elements can play a factor in determining a country’s cost competitiveness.  Real estate occupancy costs can be a meaningful contributor in the cost of delivering services in otherwise low cost countries like India.
Class A office space in prime locations is in [...]

Salary costs are critical to understand the modern trend of offshore outsourcing. Companies typically site cost reduction of one of the top reasons for outsourcing to India and the number one driver of lower services costs is salaries. Thus it is critical to understand wage differentials when making an offshore location decision to a low cost country like India.

The history of outsourcing to India is one of rapid growth and transformation. Manufacturing outsourcing, the import and export of products, goes back to almost the start of recorded history, but the extension to services is a relatively new phenomenon. Services outsourcing started in India in the mid 1980s and rapidly accelerated in the 1990s.
The [...]