Mexican Hotel Chain Outsources IT To US 125
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."
Dilbert (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Blatant lie (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Top 5 Reasons Not to Outsource to US (Score:5, Interesting)
That strikes me as the top 5 reasons not to outsource anywhere.
Re:Blatant lie (Score:5, Interesting)
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. :)
Re:Blatant lie (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course not, they're just one such country who also happens to be a country with a pretty large IT industry so that it might actually be an issue.
Yes, Iran invades people's privacy as well - but Iran isn't high on the list of places to buy "cloud storage" from.
China does to, but while China is a popular IT outsourcing destination I haven't seen a lot of "cloud storage" stuff from their (or India) - network connectivity is significantly worse than the US after all.
The underlying issue is non-domestic storage. It doesn't matter what country it is in, you have reduced the protection of your data. Now both your local government and a foreign government can request your data (and the foreign one can also physically take the hard drives). Maybe if your local government is in the business of taking physical servers by force but not doing anything about someone refusing to supply requested data you gain something - but that seems an unlikely combination.
Re:Same staff (Score:2, Interesting)
Would you say the same thing if it was a Canadian company in North Dakota?
Let's be honest. You wouldn't and the thought wouldn't have even crossed your mind.
Texas has always had a large Spanish speaking Latino population. Yes, I know it is probably hard for ignorant people to understand but not all those fighting to save the Alamo were English speaking Anglos.
It is very easy to see how businesses in places that are supportive of bilingual individuals would be attractive to foreign businesses. Texas is among those places and therefore very likely to attract businesses from places like Mexico, etc.
Now lets make things simple for you to understand. Just because it involves Mexico and people in places with large amounts of Spanish speaking individuals does not mean that everyone involved is undocumented. There are millions of non-immigrant Latinos who live in the US. Some have lived in the US far longer than you or any of your ancestors, and still retain their cultural practices. The US was always inhabited by people of different cultures who have spoken different languages. Whether those languages were English, German, Polish, Spanish, etc. etc., one of the things that was supposed to make the US great was its openness and freedom for people to be themselves without persecution.
I know many of those great US stories are just a myth. The reality is that its just as racist, bigoted, and oppressive as any other nation. But that doesn't mean that we can't push that ideal, live our lives in that dream and maybe one day make it our reality.
I know this is going to inspire a bunch of haters to write more ignorant nonsense, instead of the thoughts and ideas I was hoping to provoke. All I can say, is good luck to you, at least in my fantasy world, people are pushing towards freedom instead of oppression.
Peace.