by Anand Giridharadas, in The International Herald Tribune of April 3, 2007
An Absolute Must Read for everybody who wants to see where ITO/BPO and the Offshore movement is headed
BANGALORE, India: Outsourcing is breaking out of the back office. Until recently, the migration of service industry jobs from the West to places like India seemed to obey an unwritten law: Low-skill clerical and programming tasks would leave the developed economies, while high-end careers requiring graduate degrees and commanding six-figure salaries would stay behind.
While call centers and software houses closed in the West, often leaving their workers scrounging for employment, professionals in fields like aeronautical engineering, investment banking and drug research likely believed they had nothing to worry about.
Quietly, but steadily, that is changing. High-skilled jobs in those very fields, which once epitomized the competitiveness of Western economies, are flowing to India. The pool of jobs once thought to be impossible to outsource is gradually evaporating.
Boeing and Airbus now employ hundreds of Indians on critical tasks, including the design of next-generation cockpits and systems to prevent airborne collisions. For about one-fifth the cost, investment banks like Morgan Stanley are hiring Indians to analyze U.S. stocks, a job that can pay $200,000 a year or more on Wall Street
Eli Lilly, the U.S. drug maker, recently handed over a promising molecule it discovered to an Indian company, Nicholas Piramal, which will be paid $500,000 to $1.5 million a year per scientist for at least two years of work readying the drug for commercial use.
And with multinationals employing tens of thousands of Indians, some are beginning to treat the country like a second headquarters, sending senior executives with global responsibilities to work from India.
Cisco Systems, a maker of communications equipment, has mandated that 20 percent of its top talent be in India within five years. The company recently moved one of its five highest-ranking executives, Wim Elfrink, to Bangalore as its chief globalization officer.
"There is no job that is done in Cisco that a guy in India can't do," said Samu Devarajan, a Cisco managing director in Bangalore. "If this theater becomes successful and grows the way we want it to grow, I see no reason why the CEO of Cisco couldn't sit in India."
Accenture, the global consulting giant, has its worldwide head of business-process outsourcing in Bangalore. By December, it will have more employees in India than in the United States.
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