Mumbai Bombings Give Outsourcing Community Pause 248
theodp writes "eWeek reports that the big fear of offshore outsourcing customers has become a reality: a major bombing attack in an outsourcing hub. In the wake of the attack, companies are considering their resources and preparedness. Despite understandable fears, people on the ground don't seem to think these latest attacks will have a long-term effect on the growth of India's tech sector." From the article: "The terrorist attack in Mumbai--and conflict between Israel and Lebanon for that matter--raise a series of questions for companies sourcing technology globally. Do you know the disaster recovery plans of your offshore services provider? Are their plans integrated with yours? And how prepared are these providers? "
Come on, guys.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Are they ready for it? You can't just pick any non-industrialized nation, point and say "this is where our billion dollar software project will be made."
I'm not saying smack about India [cuz frankly I've never been there] but if the region isn't ready for the business in terms of economic, academic and political stability then maybe it isn't wise to DEPEND on them for your business?
It's one thing to ADD to your team with developers from other nations, e.g. setup a firm in Ireland or HK or something. It's another alltogether to depend solely on foreign assets.
Frankly I like the idea of spreading jobs around the globe, but only if the recipients are actually qualified to do the job. And while I like beating up on the average lame india post [see comp.lang.c] I'm not foolish enough to think that North Americans are all that much better in that regard.
Tom
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:2, Troll)
This gives them Paws? (Score:2)
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:3, Informative)
And this is in Australia, where the government really doesn't like admitting that people actually are political refugees when they can possibly deny it.
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:3, Insightful)
You are right that companies should spread and test their disaster recovery and ensure that whatever one branch or department has, the others have access to in a disaster (even if its locked up in the company vaults around the world).
We have had terrorist bombings (and other more mundane disasters) come along and wipe out entire p
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:2)
If you see, most of the big offshoring work goes to big companies, and these companies have all backups stored in multiple countries, and many many other rcovery systems.
Heck, I think the disaster recovery plans of these companies are better than most (if not all) of their clients.
They did not become such big companies for nothing.
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:2)
Who's to say some Indian-based Muslim terrorist group managed to get a 20 kT nuclear device built in Pakistan, sneak it into India, and then detonated it at Bangalore, India's technology center? The resulting detonation could kill up to one million people and deal a massive setback to India's technological progress.
We all hope that Indian security forces are extremely well-aware of this potential terror
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:2)
If Al Qaeda really wanted to destroy the US economy, they would quit futzing around with the high risk / low reward threats on US soil and just walk a nuke into one of the massive tech centers and level the entire industrial complex. IBM has centers totaling 40,000 employees and a gazillion dollars worth of investments? Tons of other companies too? Your 20kT nuke scenario would destroy the US economy on a scale that would make 9/11 look like a kindergarden cakewalk.
Luckily
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, here in the USA the really scary scenario is an improvised nuclear device (IND) attack on a critical railroad marshalling yard such as BNSF's Barstow Yard in Barstow, CA or Union Pacific's Bailey Yard in North Platte, NE, both of which are extremely critical to transc
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:4, Informative)
Now compare this with what happened in London, Madrid, NYC. Being in a particular region doesnt make you 100% safe from such things. It can happen to anywhere, at any place without any warning.
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe you guys are used to it. But *I* wouldn't rely on a country in which it is normal to see bombs blow up once in a while to handle important data for my company. Seems logical, but I guess some will call that racism. Hence my posting as an AC. Sorry.
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:2)
It is a lot more likely to happen in a country still engaged in political conflicts on OTHER PEOPLE'S soil, i.e. Iraq.
How to avoid terrorism (Score:2)
When everyone who is important decides not to invest money and resources in places where minor theological disputes are ha
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:2)
No, it raises a very good question.
Are they ready for it? You can't just pick any non-industrialized nation, point and say "this is where our billion dollar software project will be made."
As opposed to putting a billion dollar project in an industrial nation? Would you say that the U.S. was "ready" for 9/11? Risk is just a part of doing business.
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:2)
My point was you don't setup and depend on a shop in a place like India or such if they're not a stable enough region in terms of political, economical and academic senses.
Tom
Re:Come on, guys.. (Score:2)
Sure you do
What creates terrorists (Score:4, Insightful)
Home sweet home (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Home sweet home (Score:2)
Tom
Re:Home sweet home (Score:5, Funny)
Only a cereal killer would do that.
Re:Home sweet home (Score:5, Insightful)
Completely right there. This is just self interested posturing, not a genuine concern. Besides which we don't usually talk about the Israeli IT industry as 'outsourcing'.
Many of the people who flame endlessly about outsourcing are the same people who flame endlessly about libertarianism and how great the free market is.
What do slashdotters tell the people whose clerical jobs are being replaced by the systems they are developing? There is a bizare doublespeak here: Outsourcing bad, automation good. Historically IT people have been really good at protecting their own job security while making everyone else's job insecure.
Given the state of the IT job market I have a hard time feeling sorry for folk being outsourced. There are plenty of IT jobs around - if you actually have the skills that are in demand. And that should not be a problem if you really are worth the prices IT people expect.
The people who have difficulty getting a new position are the folk without formal qualifications and without a depth of knowledge in a useful field. Back in the dotcom boom I came across a consultant 'programmer' who did not know C, Fortran or Java. The only 'programming language' he knew was Delphi.
Re:Home sweet home (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Home sweet home (Score:2)
It is not a zero-sum game, it's about efficiency. The lowering of cost (whether through automation or outsourcing), in a competitive market, results in the consumer paying a lower price. This allows products to enter new markets and create new opportunities and jobs. The internet boom wasn't a strictly technology driven phenomenon, it required lower cost PCs s
Re:Home sweet home (Score:3, Interesting)
Not too long ago the general sentiment here was to send H1B workers as I then was 'back home'. Only I came over from CERN to help set up the Web consortium and bring the Web to the US. So net-net I think most people would say I created jobs here.
The point I was making is th
Re:Home sweet home (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not doublespeak; it's true. Automation would allow us to keep our trade deficits in check, increase per capita productivity, and avoid giving away our key skills gratis to those who might otherwise be paying us for them. Offshore outsourcing just piles up debt that we'll have to pay back one day (or actually more likely, just devalue our currency until the debt goes away), and it encourages the country's ability to create vital prod
Re:Home sweet home (Score:2)
I would say that the U.S. government and political system is creating a situation where the U.S. is so hostile to buisness and industrial production that it creates every incentive for outsourcing. If you see buisness as inherently bad, if you see factories as scourges on the earth, and create a whole slew of legislation, laws, restrictions, inspections, designed to restrict, punish, and discourage industrial production and productivit
Re:Home sweet home (Score:2)
I think I am going to have to say you are wrong.
It is not possible for every country to just sit in their own corner of the world and "make stuff for themselves" Not every country has all resources to produce all things and the world economy is such that poor nations will always be a source of cheap labor
Re:Home sweet home (Score:4, Insightful)
So a question: Where in the world is politically stable, economically stable, is free (so far) of catastrophic natural disasters and as a bonus has a decent climate?
Re:Home sweet home (Score:2)
Re:Home sweet home (Score:2)
The Nordic countries - Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland - are politically stable, have a steady economy (even if it is steadily deteriorating, thanks to our idiotic leaders insisting on globalization and free-market ideology) and the worst natural disasters in memory are winter storms, which typically cause rural areas to lose el
Re:Home sweet home (Score:2)
Re:Home sweet home (Score:2)
London, Madrid or New York (Score:4, Insightful)
The peoples of London, Madrid and New York were murdered at random by monsters who came to those places from distant lands where it is common to settle minor disputes by horrific acts of violence. The peoples of London, Madrid, and New York had learned from their history the futility of attempting to settle disputes through mass murder. They developed civilized methods of conflict resolution like fair court systems. They restrained themselves from mass murder in ways that are completely unknown to the subhumans who came to these cities from the disfunctional lands with the intention of genocidal slaughter.
The resulting actions after suffering horrible murder by the citizens of London, Madrid, and New York against the peoples who come from disfunctional cultures are not racist or discriminatory, but reasonable and rational acts of self-defense from the people who come to their cities with the intent of murder. It is sad that the good, law-abiding, and civilized peoples who came to the great cities of civilization in order to escape from the madness of disfuctional societies suffer in the West due to the actions of monsters.
But, it is the responsibility of the good, law-abiding, and civilized peoples from the disfuctional lands to seperate the monsters from their own society when they arrive in the civilized world. If the civilized people of a foreign culture can not or will not isolate and neutralize the monsters who live in their community, then they all will bear responsibility for the crimes that these monsters commit against the rest of the citizens. The entire community will suffer. That is the way that the world works.
The citizens of the cities that have suffered from the crimes that subhumans commit are not responsible for their inability to tell monsters from civilized people among those have come to their cities from distant lands.
Re:Home sweet home (Score:2)
And the Difference is? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is outsourcing any different from sub contracting within your own country in this respect? Quoth the article:
Quite.
Re:And the Difference is? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lou Dobbs Side: Americans are the only ones who should have decent paying jobs, that's the way God wants it.
Pragmatic Side: Most outsourced companies turn to shit because they hire just about anyone willing to work for low wages. Net result are shitty Engrish products that suck twice as hard as most natively built products.
The trick is to note there are many professional and smart people in the "outsourced nations". The problem is companies d
Re:And the Difference is? (Score:2)
I'm not even sure how to respond to this. Should I rant about slashdot's moderation system for modding this insightful
Re:And the Difference is? (Score:5, Insightful)
FTA: Do you know the disaster recovery plans of your offshore services provider? Are their plans integrated with yours? And how prepared are these providers?
In addition to your comment, not only did we not quit doing business in New York and London, but we didn't even change the way we do business. It is nearly five years after the Sept 11 attacks and most businesses still have no disaster recovery plan of their own. Does anyone seriously think that these same companies are concerned about whether their outsourced partners have such a plan? Sure, the companies that were in the WTC and lost huge amounts of people and equipment have probably laid out some plans. Some other people have probably been wise and seen the mistakes of others and laid their own plans. But largely, nobody has done anything to change they way of doing business. (Remember the proverb that says: "A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.")
Re:And the Difference is? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And the Difference is? (Score:2)
Having worked in serious disaster recovery, and disaster areas, I can tell you that the majoirty of disaster recovery plans are complete eyewash. Unless companies make a CEO level decision to actually exercise the personnel and processes involved in those plans, at a frequency that shows measureably the quality of the efforts, then no one will really know what to do. No one likes practice bleeding,
Re:And the Difference is? (Score:2)
Re:And the Difference is? (Score:2)
Re:And the Difference is? (Score:2)
How much does a disaster recovery plan cost ? Or, to put it another way: from a shareholde
Re:And the Difference is? (Score:2)
Target desirability - an attack on India's outsourcing centers would cause much more damage to India's economic infrastructure than attack on one in the US or UK if only because it would be more likely to cause companies to move their operations elsewhere; making India's a much more inviting target.
Think about your choices (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Think about your choices (Score:4, Insightful)
Corollary: Business puts a low value on human existence.
Re:Think about your choices (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is why we should be against buisness, and for giving more power to the state. Because if there is anything that Mao, Stalin, Chowchesku, Pol Pot, Hitler, Castro (and insert any other socialist dictator of your choice) have tought us, is that when you eliminate private buisness then you have a blossoming of human rights and value of human life it truly appreciated.
Yeah, and never mind that Iceland and New Zealand are amoung the most unrestricted free-market economies in the world! And that free-markets are a relatively new and still limited in India and China, which were pretty much hardcore Socialist until the last few years. Yeah, it couldn't possibly be that the people are easily exploited in India and China because of the desperate poverty created by years of mismanaged central planning, forced labour, or rigid caste system - it is all those evil evil evil buisnessmen!
If only we were valued as much as the people in buisness-free North Korea! We can only dream!
Re:Think about your choices (Score:2)
The people there are cheaper because they are in eternal struggle.
-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]
Re:Think about your choices (Score:3, Insightful)
Cheap labor.
"Seriously, when was the last time Iceland or New Zeland had some terrorist plot or civil war ensue."
The last time the majority was anything but fat, happy and content enough to expect a higher paycheck.
Re:In other News (Score:2)
India Population - 1 Billion plus
New Zealand Per Capita Income - 24K
India Per Capita Income - 4K
as compared to
US Per Capita Income - 41K
My guess is all of New Zealand's spare capacity in IT field can be absorbed by GE in less than a year.
PS: Guess which country is more attractive in terms of population and cost/benefit. These might overweigh the security risks (if they can be mitigated).
I know the salaries of people in technology field in India are quite high, but they wil
Telecom, process, geographical diversification (Score:3, Informative)
* Telecom infrastructure
* Work process
* Geographical diversification
You need reliable telecom infrastructure for obvious reasons. You need good work processes for backup and the like, but even more so that if you lose the people on a project, somebody else can step in and at least understand what needs to be done. And you need geographical diversification so that, if worst comes to worst, there IS somebody else to step in.
To the extent you have those three, outsourcing or otherwise doing business in unstable places can be a smart risk to take. If not, you can be very badly exposed.
Err... (Score:2)
Moral bankruptcy (Score:3, Insightful)
That's seems about on a par with worrying about doing business with Cantor Fitzgerald because they had an office located in the World Trade Center.
And what, exactly, makes people think that India is going to be more subject to future terrorist attacks than... well, you fill in that sentence any way you please.
Re:Moral bankruptcy (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. Specifically, they are people who have the responsibility to prevent or otherwise deal with IT outages.
The people who think the only moral thing to do in a crisis is to be emotionally overwrought are of no use to anyone when a crisis occurs. You can go sit in a closet and cry while the rest of us solve problems for the people who didn't get killed.
Re:Moral bankruptcy (Score:2)
And what, exactly, makes people think that India is going to be more subject to future terrorist attacks than... well, you fill in that sentence any way you please.
Kashmir and Pakistan. India has recently been subject to more terrorist attacks than most places-- a couple a year for the past five or six years, I think. There were bombings in Mumbai a few years ago, so it's not like this is new either.
Re:Moral bankruptcy (Score:3, Insightful)
People who live and work there are wondering if they should anymore (if they even have a choice). People who do business there are wondering if they should take their business elsewhere. The people that run these companies are paid to keep the companies running, not shut down operations in protes
Re:Moral bankruptcy (Score:2)
if you think that people who have dealings in the area aren't questioning their future you are being naive.
Well, I suppose the fools are "questioning their future", but the competent (not "naive") people would already have plans in place.
And what if there is a future IT outage due to terrorist attacks? How would that affect the world? How would that affect the companies that are subject to that outage? Would they fold? Would their employees be out of work and as such no longer able to support their f
Re:Moral bankruptcy (Score:2)
No, it is more harmfull than blind forces of nature for a simple nonmagical reason: there's a malicious intelligence behind the events, guiding them so they cause maximum damage, and which will likely strike again.
Re:Moral bankruptcy (Score:3, Informative)
And what, exactly, makes people think that India is going to be more subject to future terrorist attacks than... well, you fill in that sentence any way you please.
Oh, I don't know... maybe it's that little feud they've got going on with their next-door neighbor Pakistan, AND both of them have nukes?
Re:Moral bankruptcy (Score:2)
That's not moral bankruptcy as you claim, it's people worrying about what will affect them more. Lot's of people die every day for lots of reasons -- it's not our moral responsibility to worry for each and every one of them.
-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]
not really. (Score:3, Insightful)
Many people died in New Orleans, too, when Katrina blew and washed through. Guess what? Companies are moving data centers away from there, too. Is that wrong?
Plug in "hurricanes" instead of "bombs" for where you said "future events," and you'll g
Re:Moral bankruptcy (Score:2, Insightful)
One word: Kashmir.
Re:Moral bankruptcy (Score:2)
You do realise the society is run for the benefit of the economy, and not the other way around.
Re:Moral bankruptcy (Score:2)
Mourning is fine, but the living have to get on with life. As Jesus said: "Let the dead bury the dead."
By the way, Israel isn't at war with Lebanon. They're at war with Hezbollah, wh
Re:Moral bankruptcy (Score:2)
Bullshit (Score:3, Insightful)
So why the fuck is the bombing in Mumbai so important to
Mark me flamebait, lazy overpaid supremacist!
-clueless
Re:Bullshit (Score:2)
Re:Bullshit (Score:2)
Silly (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, many of the export centers are not in the city center and were unaffected by this event. Knowing many Indians, those that were will be back up and running in no time flat no matter what it takes.
Now, there may be reasons to rethink outsourcing such as low productivity, higher costs, poor quality of work, and customer relation issues but this is not one of them.
The best wishes of many people in the US go out to every Indian and we stand in solidarity with the many many millions of peace loving, free citizens of that nation.
*sigh* (Score:4, Insightful)
My second reaction was shame that that should be my first reaction, when I have friends and colleagues with family there.
Personally, I don't think this should have a practical impact on outsourcing decisions. India is a stable democracy; war may stir ethnic and religious resentment, but I don't see things changing overnight in a way that affects business. And even at intolerable levels, terrorist attacks have almost no actuarial significance.
On the other hand, China is frightening. It's not longer precisely accurate to call it a totalitarian state, but politically it is still a one party, non-democratic state. Mature democracies have a kind of dynamic stability, where individuals and parties change, but politics and policy don't shift that dramatically. Systems based on the authority of a single group may be superficially stable, but they are vulnerable to individuals or groups of individuals being replaced, or even just changing their minds. Put the nation under stress, and you could well have an ultra-ideological hard liner becoming supreme leader.
how can you rate the loss of a human life? (Score:2)
yeah ! Let's make a back up of our chief engineer's brain, just in case he gets blown to pieces, you insensitive clod!
Re:how can you rate the loss of a human life? (Score:2)
No, it's "let's not amplify the personal tragedy to the point where it threatens to collaterally damage the lives of all of our employees and investors and everyone who does business with us, by being too stupid to take sensible steps to protect our business."
Or, as the adage says, "don't put all your eggs in one basket."
What crap! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:*from* india ? (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree - I thought the same thing when I saw the USA exporting troops to Iraq, for the same reasons...
And this will mean what, exactly? (Score:2)
Security=cost of doing business (Score:2)
The same can be said for a country. Right now, I'm willing to be there are not a whole lot of companies looking to open shops up in N Korea, Lebanon, Iran and Syria.
Stable go
Re:Security=cost of doing business (Score:2)
Uhuh.
Uh, yeah. It's fairly certain that the US Gov't is not going to radically change overnight, when compared to say... Burma. The odds of a coup happening here are pretty slim. Businesses know that the rules are not going the change overnight and some new government is not going to seize your business. This is why foreign based investments can be considered risky. Granted, some domestic investments are risky too, but not because o
Re:Security=cost of doing business (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, and I think some of the people out there un-learned it during the studies for their MBA degree.
No, I don't think that an MBA is imnical to things or that it's the root cause of all of this- hell,
I'm getting an MBA first and then going back to finish my MSCS because of what I'm ending up doing
in my life these days. But I do think that there's a lot of goings on that just run counter to
sustainability th
Re:Security=cost of doing business (Score:2)
News flash: the vast majority of the US, its citizens and even its businessmen are of vastly higher character than Hollywood portrays them to the world at large.
What will India do? (Score:2)
That is really what is at stake. Does India have what it takes to invade and occupy a country, any country, as a demonstration to their citizens and the world that they will not tolerate terror?
How does a country assure the world that it is working to make itself safe from terror? Has the Bush administration made the U.S. safe from terror by channeling Homeland Security money to Indiana Amish popcorn factories instead of container-by-container port inspection?
Not terrorism, infrastructure (Score:3, Insightful)
For instance, if you are moving your call centre overseas (albeit you would probably be the last company to do so). Can you trust that the telecom downtime will be negligable?
Or for any type of business. Is the local power supply reliable?
Both of the above examples are not simgle massive event but constant issues and be massively damaging to mantaining custom.
IMHO those are the types of concern that outsourcers should be taking into account when moving abroad.
Having said that I imagine that labour is pretty cheap in the Gaza Strip right now, but I dont think many companies will be moving in at the moment.
"Outsourcing community"?? (Score:2)
Maybe they should outsource their community?
Run for the Hills! (Score:3, Interesting)
But wait: One in 2,600,000 Americans die each and every day in automobile accidents! That can only mean we need to prepare for Armageddon!
The High Costs of Muslim Populations (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The High Costs of Muslim Populations (Score:2, Interesting)
The Indian Express [indianexpress.com]
Sunday, July 16, 2006 Tavleen Singh
It has long been my view that political correctness is dangerous and usually harms those people and ideas it seeks in a muddled liberal fashion to protect. But, even as someone who holds this view, I was astounded at the insane political correctness we saw in the response of the political class and most of the media to last week's ghastly bombings in Mumbai.
The issue is terrorism. Right? The issue is the
What I think... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just another rant against outsourcing (Score:3, Informative)
For your information, no.
Punjab did have a violent separatist movement in the 1980s. That's history now. There's far more separatist violence in Corsica or the Basque country. Or Quebec.
Re:Just another rant against outsourcing (Score:2)
Riiight... (Score:2)
The only reason it's risen to this position in the IT industry is that they're adequate in
many situations and they're cheap. No concerns whatsoever were being applied to whether or
not the whole project would go up in flames because of a terrorist bombing over there or not.
Sure, it can happen here. It can happen anywhere, in all honesty, so long as there's people
willing to commit terroristic acts. It's just that it
Re:Riiight... (Score:2)
Russia is some country to be cautious against i admit. It is practically governed by mafia.
You shouldnt view trying to show profitability as a bad thing. Going to the EXTREMES like handing out sensitive projects to for example russia is a bad thing however.
One needs to find a balance between things like all matters
Re:Riiight... (Score:2)
Re:Riiight... (Score:2)
From scratch projects, and only their infrastructure can be allowed to be outsourced to a risky environment such as this.
Re:Just another rant against outsourcing (Score:2)
In countries that create silicon valleys after planning it, even ethnic minorities, the income level of the region to build it in is taken into account. At least in turkey.
You will find that almost all of the industrial and technological centers, important military installations, ie 'the core' of turkey is in its part that is in the middle of the range from its western coast to its center.
Re:Sorry they got bombed - can I have my job back (Score:2)
Tell your former employer (Score:2)
Who are they? I won't be buying from them either.
Let's boycott the fsckers until they bring the jobs back.