Body Shops Shopping for Bodies in U.S.
Let’s start with what you might think of as a, well, perhaps provocative quote from an India Daily editorial a year ago:
Body shopping is what Indian software companies call software development. It is facilitated by inefficient American management in American companies that need cheap labor to service arrogant, inefficient and unproductive managers. These American companies buy these Indian bodies, commonly known as cyber coolies, cheap, and use them to satisfy their whimsical needs.
So tell us what you really think. Speaking of arrogance, the highly uncomplimentary tone of this little paragraph is pretty revealing, but it does make clear that the sheer volume of software development being done in India for U.S. companies has led to the coining of this term, “body shop.”
Now perhaps we’re going to see some version of that in the United States. In the last few months, the growth of Indian companies and the IT services they provide for U.S. companies has begun to take on a new image. Not exactly a mirror image, but a sort of ironic twist, more like a fun-house mirror, maybe. There is news in the last few weeks of Indian IT company Wipro buying U.S.-based “infrastructure management provider” Infocrossing in order to establish a physical presence in the United States. Wipro hopes this move will make it more attractive to U.S. companies that want to outsource software development but don’t want their data residing overseas.
This looks like something of a trend. Application development firm Caritor, most of whose employees are based in India, bought Keane, a U.S.-based IT services provider, in June. Recent articles reporting on these events in Information Week suggest that the Indian companies are looking to expand without running afoul of the politically sensitive U.S. limit of 65,000 guest-worker visas as well as to extend their reach to larger clients that are reluctant to let sensitive data reside abroad.
In order to keep profits flowing, Wipro plans to hire cheaper U.S. employees—people with associate degrees rather than bachelor’s degrees, and ex-military personnel. Another quote, this time from the Aug. 13 Information Week article:
“There will be competition but not scarcity of talent in India,” [says Bharat Desai, CEO of U.S. outsourcer Syntel, which has 90% of its 10,000 employees in India]. There will be competition but not scarcity of talent in India,” he says, thanks to a large and growing population of young people seeking tech-related degrees. In the United Sates, Desai sees the opposite: a severe shortage of tech talent looming, especially as baby boomers retire and take with them knowledge of ‘tens of millions of lines of legacy code.’
Body shop, anyone?
Curt Barry is president of F. Curtis Barry & Co., a warehouse consulting firm; online at: http://www.fcbco.com.