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Companies Finding Some Computer Jobs Best Done in U.S.
By EDUARDO PORTER
Published: April 28, 2004
Robert Spencer for The New York Times
Vijay Manwani, left, Bladelogic's chief technology officer, and Dev Ittycheria, at the main office in Waltham, Mass.
ven
as the prospect of high-skilled American jobs moving to low-wage
countries like India ignites hot political debate, some entrepreneurs
are finding that India's vaunted high-technology work force is not
always as effective as advertised.
"For three years we tried all kinds of models, but nothing has worked
so far," said the co-founder and chief technology officer of
Storability Software in Southborough, Mass. After trying to reduce
costs by contracting out software programming tasks to India,
Storability brought back most of the work to the United States, where
it costs four times as much, and hired more programmers here. The
"depth of knowledge in the area we want to build software is not good
enough" among Indian programmers, the executive said.
If it sounds like "Made in the U.S.A." jingoism, consider this: The
entrepreneur, Hemant Kurande, is Indian. He was born and raised near
Bombay and received his master's degree from the Indian Institute of
Technology in that city, now known as Mumbai. Mr. Kurande is not alone
in his views on "outsourcing" technology work to India. As more
companies in the United States rush to take advantage of India's ample
supply of cheap yet highly trained workers, even some of the most
motivated American companies — ones set up or run by executives born
and trained in India — are concluding that the cost advantage does not
always justify the effort.
For many of the most crucial technology tasks, they find that a work
force operating within the American business environment better suits
their needs.
"Only certain kinds of tasks can be outsourced — what can be set down
as a set of rules," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist of Global
Insight, a forecasting and consulting firm based in Waltham, Mass.
"That which requires more creativity is more difficult to manage at a
distance."
Another Indian executive in the United States who has soured on
outsourcing is Dev Ittycheria, the chief executive of Bladelogic, a
designer of network management software with 70 workers, also in
Waltham. Bladelogic, whose client list includes General Electric
and Sprint, outsourced work to India within months of going into
business in 2001. But it concluded that projects it farmed out — one to
install an operating system across a network, another to keep tabs on
changes done to the system — could be done faster and at a lower cost
in the United States.
That was true even though programmers in India cost Bladelogic $3,500 a
month versus a monthly cost of $10,000 for programmers in the United
States. "The cost savings in India were three to one," Mr. Ittycheria
said . "But the difference in productivity was six to one."
Bladelogic's chief technology officer, Vijay Manwani, born and educated
in India, predicts that once the "hype cycle" about Indian outsourcing
runs its course, projects will come back to the United States "when
people find that their productivity goals have not been met."
The upshot is that high-technology corporations are likely to ship more
and more business functions to India to take advantage of its
well-trained work force. However, even as they do so they will keep
many essential tasks here.
For instance, Storability Software, which designs systems to manage
data storage and has 25 employees in the United States, first tried to
outsource some core programming tasks to a big software contractor in
India. When that did not work, it tried a more specialized boutique.
When this company did not deliver up to Storability's specifications
either, the company hired four programmers in the United States to help
rewrite the code.
But Storability also stuck to India, setting up its own small shop in
Pune late last year, where its 25 programmers perform noncore tasks.
"We essentially realigned our motivations," Mr. Kurande said. "We were
able to figure out areas of our engineering that suited them."
The Indian entrepreneurs in this country — business executives with the
cultural affinity and local connections that might be most conducive to
making offshore partnerships work — do not fault the work ethic of the
programmers in India. But they say the geographic distance and the
differences in business contexts can be difficult to bridge.
A typical challenge is the difficulty of finding programmers overseas
who can go beyond following well-known procedures to the next steps of
identifying problems and creating new solutions.
ven
as the prospect of high-skilled American jobs moving to low-wage
countries like India ignites hot political debate, some entrepreneurs
are finding that India's vaunted high-technology work force is not
always as effective as advertised.
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