IT outsourcing – offshoring – nearshoring – global delivery? They’re familiar terms today – in fact, they are buzzwords. Once they meant only cost-saving, but now these term more often refer to technical excellence.
When I first went to Bangalore in the early 2000’s to manage a global delivery facility for Hewlett Packard, I was amazed. I had traveled India before as a tourist, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from Bangalore. What I found was a metropolis of IT. That was 14 years ago. Today, depending on what source you read, Bangalore is the center of 41% of all engineering research and development (ER&D) and 39% of all global in-house centers (GIC) in India. In human terms, it has 530,000 trained technical people. And that’s just the one city. Directly or indirectly, India employs about 3 million people in direct IT support, and another 7 million in indirect support.
That’s more than 50% of all global outsourcing.
So – when did this begin? How did it start? Where did it start? Why? Like Henry Ford’s garage it had simple beginnings. And in 30 years it has become a mammoth industry.
I first waded into this water in 2005. But my Dad, now a semi-retired systems designer and professor of computer sciences, remembers start-up days back in the 1970’s and 1980’s – literally decades before many people think “offshore” began. Together we assembled some memories of those first days that we’ll be publishing in a series of upcoming blogs. I think you’ll find it both enlightening and fun. It’s like looking back at Mr. Ford’s first assembly line.
The “offshore” model, with my team in Bangalore:
And the “nearshore” model, with my team in Bulgaria:
The story begins here on my Dad’s blog, with the link here: A little known history of IT offshoring – Part I