Building a Modern SOA: Examining Offshoring All Over Again

The word “offshoring” and its sibling “outsourcing” can provoke instant, righteous anger among some people, while being touted as a one-size-fits-all panacea by others. The recent decade or so of outsourcing and offshoring—particularly to India within the IT business—has generated copious case studies, best practices, and worst practices.
 

Everyone has a story to tell, or several, and debate ranges on within companies and on the pages of websites, magazines, and books as to whether The Grand India Experiment will ultimately succeed or fail. But now’s not the time for grand theories. It is time instead to focus on what is smart and what is doable.

Smart and doable does not mean reflexive, though. “In tough economic times, it’s easy enough to fall prey to the desire to cut costs at all costs,” said one of several IT executives interviewed for this story, an executive at a software company. “More offshoring springs immediately to mind. Bulk up your India operation, in a country where you can still hire five or six people for the price of a single person in Silicon Valley.”
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