That should end all this bruhaha, if accents etc are the problem, Indian companies have and will be glad to outsource this back to the Uk. That is the fact on the ground and that is helping Brits and Indians.

Since 2000, 12000 UK workers have ben hired BY INDIAN COMPANIES OPERATING FROM INDIA and as Indian companies become more competitive more jobs wil be created. That is called free trade. People do not tend to look at the big picture, I got my knwledge of economics ridiculed when I pointed this out a few pages agol, of course there is structural unemployment aka skill mismatch in the UK and that takes time to rectify but things are getting better, there will be a DEMAND FOR 700000 JOBS IN 2010 IN THE UK AND NOONE WILL BE AVAILABLE IN THE UK TO TAKE THEM, talk about free trade being bad. 😀

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/articleshow/899387.cms

While the US is still finding ways and means of curbing outsourcing of work to India, the UK government is inviting domestic IT companies.

Ian Hughes, deputy high commissioner, UK, says, “There are around 480 Indian companies which have invested in UK, of which 355 are IT companies. Moreover, these companies are investing across the country , not only in London.”

“It is much more easier to invest in UK than in any other country in Europe. We have shifted the European base for MphasiS from Holland to UK. Even visas are easier to get,” according to Jerry Rao, Chairman, MphasiS.

UK gives business express visa to companies, which have a subsidiary or branch office in the country. According to Mark Dolan, deputy director, British Commission, “These visas are given to existing employees of the company and help them in setting up their operations in UK. There is no upper limit on the number of visas, but they are related to the size of the company.”

For instance, a company like TCS, which has invested in UK for more than 30 years, will more or less get all the visas it needs . But a small eight-man outfit will get a lesser number, Hughes said.

According to Rao, “There is no public push-back to outsourcing in UK. British companies are more eager to outsource than even some US companies. The country has a good telecom infrastructure and the language helps.” Overall, it is a wise decision to invest there, he says.

There are some skill-based hubs also emerging, which are now being tapped by Indian companies. For instance, Reading has a number of accounting, auditing and consulting firms. Edinburgh is a good place to recruit financial professionals. Wales has a fairly large automotive design talent. In fact, HCL Technologies has been ramping up its call centre in Belfast, according to Dolan.

Outsourcing is unlikely to become an election issue in UK, as none of the parties are likely to raise it. The Conservative Party is unlikely to raise the issue, which is labour-related. At the most, politicians whose constituencies have seen job losses, may raise issues of data security.

“We have to be pro-free trade as it will only help the country’s productivity and economy in the long run,” Hughes says.

The beauty of free trade, Indian companies are also looking for UK workers

http://www.rediff.com/money/2004/nov/03bpo.htm

Indian IT major HCL said on Wednesday that it will add 300-400 more jobs during this fiscal at its business process outsourcing centre in Northern Ireland, making the country a hub for its European operations.

In a reversal of the trend of UK companies relocating call centres to India, HCL said its BPO in Belfast can garner more business from clients in Europe, who are reluctant to outsource works to offshore locations like India.

HCL BPO already employs 1100 people at the call centre in Belfast, an operation it took over from BT (British Telecom) in 2001, retaining the entire 290 employees.

“HCL is the largest Indian employer in the UK in the IT sector,” N Ranjit, chief operating officer, HCL BPO, told reporters in Chennai, after a meeting with a delegation from Northern Ireland, led by its economy minister Barry Gardiner.

Explaining the advantages of Northern Ireland, Ranjit said lower labour costs of at least 15 per cent as compared to other European centres and high quality of manpower, were the main factors helping HCL BPO in Belfast.

“Our Belfast revenues have grown to £20 million this year from £16 million last year,” he said.

Stuart Innes, British Deputy High Commissioner, said India and the UK were coming closer through better economic ties, as shown by the increasing investments by Indian companies in the UK and vice-versa.

“UK is now the second biggest investor into India and India is the eighth biggest investor in the UK,” he said.

http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=42293

Reflecting the growing bilateral trade, over 500 Indian companies have started operating in the UK during the last three to four years, Indian High Commissioner Kamalesh Sharma has said.

“The companies included an outsourcing unit
which I visited recently in Belfast which employs 1,100 people,” he said last night at a lecture demonstration by renowned Kathak exponent Gauri Sharma Tripathi at the Nehru Centre, the cultural wing of the High Commission here.

“Britain and India are natural partners in the new economy and the two countries could benefit a great deal in sharing knowledge in the fields of biotechnology, communications, Information Technology and R and D.

http://www.rediff.com/money/2004/jan/28bpo5.htm

Fast-growing Indian companies in the United Kingdom have pumped in about £300 million into the British economy to date and their investment levels may increase as India becomes more prosperous, Sunil Mehta, vice-chairman of the National Association of Software and Service Companies, has said.

A survey by Nasscom and Evalueserve indicated that the passage of jobs between India and the UK is not a one-way street.
Mehta believes that about 12,000 jobs have moved from India to the UK, mostly in the services and IT industries.

Among leading Indian companies in the UK is Wipro Technologies, which provides British companies with business processing operations in India.

Wipro has grown rapidly as British and American companies increasingly rely on its services to shift jobs overseas. The report states that Wipro employs 590 people in the UK and that its European revenue in 2002 reached £121 million.

Also highlighted are the operations of Infosys, another Indian IT company that has made rapid progress on the back of companies moving jobs to India.

Infosys Technologies opened in the UK in 1996. According to the company’s latest accounts, its European revenue reached £75 million in 2002. The company has 450 employees in the UK.

The third Indian company is the Tata Consultancy Service, which has been in the UK since 1975. Its clients include Bank of Scotland, British Telecom, and Transco.

Tata has 1,000 employees in the UK.

Despite the report’s positive outlook, there is still concern among the UK opposition parties that jobs being moved offshore will have a long-term detrimental impact on the employment market in the UK.

Unions, particularly those whose members work in the financial sector, are becoming increasingly anxious to curtail the job losses.

According to a research commissioned by Nasscom, Britain will face a massive skills shortage by the end of this decade.

Britain’s ageing population and slow birth rate will leave the country short of 700,000 workers in health and social care, retailing and financial services by 2010.

AS ONE CAN SEE FREE TRADE HAS NOT ONLY TAKEN AWAY JOBS AND FROM THAT LAST LINE AS I MENTIONED BEFORE THE DEBATE SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABOUT EDUCATION, THERE WILL BE SO MANY JOBS AND SO FEW TO TAKE THEM UP 🙂 but most people do not tend to read up on facts.

“These days we’re just everyday folk who get on with other everyday folk without slaughtering them en masse for having the wrong religion or the wrong colour skin. We’ve learned from our mistakes, and moved on.”

Must be why the right wing in Europe has blossomed relative to ten years ago in many European countries then. Noone is talking about extreme slaughter for skin colour, I think that you are taking this into yet another extreme.

Socialism is not a relative term, but a set of policies and economic theories. Surely you learned that at the LSE?

Turkey may very well be a majority Moslem country, but it is a constitutionally and politically secular state.

The majority religion in India is Hinduism but India, too, is a secular state is it not? With quite a few Socialists and even Marxists about in State government, if I recall correctly.

If you’re dragging out the arguments of the French Right (M. Le Pen, perchance?) in support of your assertions, then I should warn you that few everyday Europeans take that sort of thing seriously.

These days we’re just everyday folk who get on with other everyday folk without slaughtering them en masse for having the wrong religion or the wrong colour skin. We’ve learned from our mistakes, and moved on.

Oh God, quit getting personal, shish

How old are you anyway?

My argument was not that Turkey is secular or not, I said that many Europeans may not be comfortable with an entrace of a Muslim majority state into the Union, noone is talking about secularism here, we are talking about the average person’s thought on what Europe means.

Socialism is a benchmark of French politics, go listen to what Chirac said about France’s socialist principles. We are not talking aout USSR socialism here, there are different extremes of being on the left, heard of social democrats, they consider themselves to be neosocialists. Anyway I won’t bother with you. And can you stop being personal all the time, its geeting annoying, and you are a moderator?
I am not talking about the extreme right of France as well. :rolleyes:

The demographics of Europe are changing and will change faster with the entrance of Turkey, some may not like that.

Europe is not a socialist entity and Turkey is a secular state.

Socialism is a relative term, Europe is much more left wing than the US and most of Asia.

Turkey is a Muslim majority country and Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe, I simply said that perhaps not all secular Europeans will be comfortable with that idea and if you actually look at the arguments of the right in France, you would realize that I did not simply make this up. :rolleyes:

It is possible to conclude that France and the Dutch people have rejected the constitution or can I see in in the following way.

This was the first time when Europeans were consulted about the EU, the vote of non by the French and Ney by the Dutch may have been a protest on not only the constitution but on many concearns such as countries like Bulgaria etc joining in. Also is the so called secular and socialist Europe ready for a Muslim country like Turkey to join the Eu?

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/42781.html

India Maintains Outsourcing Advantage

By Anthony Mitchell
http://www.EcommerceTimes.com
Part of the ECT News Network
05/03/05 5:00 AM PT

The Indian IT outsourcing industry’s advantages as an outsourcing destination include overall quality, good value, increasing domain expertise and increasingly sophisticated performance metrics and program management skills. India stands ready to maintain its position as the top outsourcing destination for many years to come.

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New information technology outsourcing opportunities are largely going to India, thanks to India’s long-standing advantages. Despite negative press coverage that India has received for problems at a few outsourcing facilities, India is set to maintain its lead as the high-tech outsourcing destination of choice for U.S. clients.

India has the advantage of quality, price competitiveness, infrastructure, economic diversity and a vibrant corps of Western expatriates embedded as managers in Indian information technology (IT) firms. India’s quality and price advantages are detailed herein.

IT Cultural Revolution and the Rush to Quality
The drive for market share in the global IT outsourcing market has produced more CMM Level 5 software centers in India than anywhere else in the world. CMM is the highest level achievable under the Capability Maturity Model, a quality system standard developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Indian managers realized that economic benefits would be gained by quality improvements and have energetically pursued those benefits.

The conception of quality is undergoing a sea change at Indian IT facilities. At non-Indian IT outsourcing facilities offshore, quality is often seen as part of a larger process, attended to and owned by the macro level of each organization. In those settings, as in government owned firms in India, the individual merely needs to follow procedures to comply with quality standards.

In a dramatic departure with old-style Indian management techniques, the IT industry has shifted the locus for quality down to individual people and individual actions. Ten years ago, Western clients would often complain that instead of merely having IT facility managers take ownership for the overall quality, Westerners simply wanted every individual in their offshore contractor’s organization to take ownership for each phone call, each e-mail and each trouble ticket that came their way.

Before the outsourcing cultural revolution broke out in India in the last half of the 1990s, when a problem or question came to an employee, it was considered proper for that employee to refer that problem to someone else for resolution. People would feel as if they had done their job properly if they made referrals rather than taking the initiative to fix a problem or answer a question themselves.

The IT workforces in India, particularly younger managers, are increasingly adopting U.S. approaches to quality and individual initiative. This makes the outsourcing process easier to launch and maintain. It has enabled Indian facilities to cross the trust threshold with many of their U.S. clients.

How Sub-Par Facilities Hold onto Clients
Even Indian outsourcing facilities operating at moderate levels of quality have been able to hold onto U.S. clients by establishing good long-term customer relationships. Once a call center or data processing firm has established a good track record with an American client, that client is likely to continue working with that firm unless their prices or quality takes a serious turn for the worse. This is true at both U.S. domestic and offshore call centers.

American clients of call centers will usually continue working with an outsourcing facility that is not always up to par with service quality — as long as such clients believe that the facility’s managers are quick to respond to client concerns.

Although it spent a few years floundering after a modest start in 1999, the Indian commercial call center industry has climbed out of its infancy. Clients with the patience to support their offshore contractor operations in India and to budget for adequate training and ramp up periods have often been rewarded by increases in quality and performance.

Increasing Domain Expertise
Call center and software firms in India are well positioned for continued quality and process improvements. This is due, in part, to continuing improvements in their domain expertise. Domain expertise refers to knowledge of the subject areas in which people work.

New software and call center firms starting up offshore often lack focus or domain expertise. Lack of domain expertise adds hidden costs to U.S. clients, who must spend time transferring domain expertise to their offshore contractors.

By specializing and not attempting to do everything, Indian software and call center firms have often been able to gain domain expertise, establish proven track records within those domains, and to provide both better quality outputs and better value for money for their clients.

Long-Term Price Competitiveness
Costs have been increasing in India and will continue to do so for ingredients such as labor, land and taxes. However, India will remain a cost-competitive destination because of high initial value propositions and because of unrealized opportunities for cost control.

Voice services and non-voice back office processing work (also called business process outsourcing or BPO) are more price sensitive than software development. Redirection of outsourcing work away from India would be understandable for cost reasons, yet the price per production (login) hour at many top-tier Indian centers has fallen from US$18 per hour four years ago to $15 an hour or less today. Prices charged to U.S. clients for training time at Indian facilities have also dropped.

There are opportunities for cost control beyond mere reductions in hourly charges. In 2001, when my firm began sending voice work to India, we could not find one call center there that owned an interactive voice response (IVR) system in the U.S. to enable the center to handle customer inquiries before routing a call overseas to a live agent. The industry at that time was not attuned to clients’ needs to reduce talk time and therefore clients’ costs.

Indian outsourcing firms have become increasingly sophisticated about using technology to achieve lower costs and better services for U.S. customers. Now completely automated inbound call handling solutions for domestic U.S. customers are cheaper and more seamless from Indian providers than U.S. ones.

The head start that India has over other outsourcing destinations has given its IT workforce a head start on building up a professionalism and competence that will enable that workforce to provide better value for money in the coming years, despite wage increases. Whereas the call center workforce in some areas of India has experienced annual turnover rates of 50 to 100 percent, the annual turnover rate at software firms such as Infosys has remained a staid 10 percent.

Sophisticated Performance Metrics
Indian outsourcing firms have become increasingly proficient at working with U.S. clients to reduce the average cost per call. Performance metrics such as average speed of answer, average length of call, first-call resolution rates, and customer satisfaction data are receiving increasing and well-deserved attention across wide sections of the customer service industry in India. The sophistication of metrics reporting now seen at Indian call centers often rivals or exceeds what is available from North American providers — many of whom are working with older and less sophisticated equipment than is in use at newer Indian facilities.

The quantitative focus on performance metrics is giving Indian call centers the ability to drive costs down for customers. It provides Indian call center professionals with skill sets that they are taking with them on international training and consulting assignments in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Dubai.

The proficiency and high-level capabilities that many Indian IT professionals are capable of demonstrating on a consistent basis is evidenced in the rise of Indian-based IT project management firms such as eBusiness India, who are my direct competitors. A few years ago I would not have paid much attention to them. Now their performance capabilities are equaling or exceeding what Americans can do.

Low Currency Risk
The declining value of the U.S. dollar has been a concern at offshore facilities in South Asia. Kurian James, who directs an InternationalStaff.net contract facility in South India, jokingly remarked that if the U.S. dollar loses any more of its value, then he will be able to afford an American chef. However, the U.S. dollar has not lost significant value against the Indian Rupee, particularly when compared to other currencies such as the Euro.

The U.S. dollar’s loss in value to the Euro has been fluctuating between 30 percent and 40 percent over the last three years. Both currencies have lost value compared to gold. Changes in the value of the Indian Rupee to the dollar have been comparatively mild, with exchange rate now at a little more than 43 Indian Rupees to the dollar. Two years ago the rate was a little more than 47 Rupees to the dollar.

All the outsourcing contracts from the U.S. to India that I have seen are in U.S. dollars. All the ones that I have written have provided no allowance for reductions in the value of the U.S. dollar. This reduces risks for U.S. firms from additional currency fluctuations and adds to India’s attractiveness as an outsourcing destination compared to destinations such as Canada.

In summary, the Indian IT outsourcing industry’s advantages as an outsourcing destination include overall quality, good value, increasing domain expertise and increasingly sophisticated performance metrics and program management skills. Other countries might challenge India’s IT outsourcing lead, but India stands ready to maintain its position as the top outsourcing destination for many years to come.