Skyline Global Outsourcing Update

As many fear about the repercussions of cloud software on India’s IT services industry, the country’s second-largest IT services firm is scripting a uniquely Infoscion way of converting the challenge to an opportunity. Software-makers and dotcoms may be rehashing their products for new Cloudscape, but Infosys is going one step further — infusing its entire outsourcing model with the power of the cloud. Cloud computing refers to the technology underlying Internet-based IT services, kicked off by pioneers like Hotmail. The Sabeer Bhatia-founded firm exemplified the ‘cloud era’ by making email software such as Outlook surperfluous to its users.

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

Xerox Corp. is beginning a major advertising campaign across the United States and Europe aimed at hyping its brand and business process outsourcing work. The campaign, which will be on multiple platforms including online, also includes airport advertising. It starts in the U.S. on Tuesday and in Europe later this year. A website tied to the campaign, RealBusiness.com, also goes live on Tuesday. Xerox’ customers are other businesses, as opposed to consumers, and the ad campaign will focus on business-oriented media outlets, said Christa Carone, Xerox chief marketing officer. Carone declined to say how much Xerox is spending on the advertising push, but said it was Xerox’s largest such campaign “in a couple of decades.”

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin’s technology outsourcing cost the city an unnecessary $1 million more than if the work had been done in-house, according to a new report from Ed Quatrevaux, the city's inspector general. The report, issued Aug. 30th, found the city’s contract with Telecommunications Development Corp. wasted more than $750,000 in an eight-month period from salaries alone. TDC salaries would have cost the city $960,000 more annually than having city employees do those tasks, Quatrevaux said in the report.

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

India's flagship outsourcing industry reacted angrily Saturday to a new US law tightening security at the Mexico border with measures paid for by steep hikes in American work visa fees. The 600-million-dollar legislation, signed into law Friday by US President Barack Obama, will nearly double visa fees for some Indian information technology workers entering the United States. The US is giving a very strong signal foreigners are not welcome, said Som Mittal, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), which represents India's leading software exporters. The row comes as India readies to host Obama later this year and as anti-outsourcing anger in the United States has been stoked by high unemployment. The law, passed in the run-up to November US polls, earmarks funds from the visa fee hike to pay for the US government's plans to boost security along its border with Mexico to crack down on illegal immigration and drug smuggling.

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

President Barack Obama Friday signed a bill that tightens security at the Mexico border, hoping to address the hot issue of illegal immigration in the run-up to November congressional elections. The 600-million-dollar legislation hikes visa fees for some IT workers entering the United States, and has had been slammed by Indian industry. The fee increases pay for 1,000 new US Border Patrol agents to form a "strike force" for quick deployment, 250 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as well as 250 new Customs and Border Protection officers at ports of entry. It also boosts communications among law-enforcement officials. The new law nearly doubles fees on visas for skilled workers brought in by companies whose staffs are more than 50 percent foreign, a move that largely affects India's IT and outsourcing industries.

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

In a move that could upset the Indian outsourcing industry's robust growth so far, China has announced operating tax exemption for its outsourcing businesses till 2013. The exemption, which will benefit Chinese companies in 21 cities, is in line with China's aggressive campaign to emerge as the top outsourcing destination in Asia. India's IT related outsourcing services — a sunshine industry — can no longer take comfort in the logic of economic competitiveness. Apart from a rising China, the sector is also looking at rising protectionism in its primary client destination, the US.

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

Outsourcing is to a company's viability as high unemployment is to a job-based economy. At least it can be, according to a new study co-authored by University of Utah David Eccles School of Business researchers that is an explicit heads-up to companies bent on cutting corners — and often jobs — in a desperate attempt to cut costs. The strategy of bolstering a firm's bottom line through outsourcing manufacturing, quality control and even customer service holds as much long-term risk as it does short-term financial or market position gain, according to Lyda Bigelow, an assistant professor of management whose ongoing research focuses on strategies businesses use to expand and how they handle, or often mishandle, change. Despite the hazards of losing quality control through outsourcing, which has a long history of being an Achilles' heel at many companies, outsourcing is booming.

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

In the latest battle over outsourcing, the Indian government has fired back at the U.S. Last week, U.S. senators unanimously passed a proposal to nearly double the fees on work visas for Indian IT companies sending workers to the U.S. Indian Trade Minister Anand Sharma has called the move “highly discriminatory” in a letter to his counterpart, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk. As Bloomberg News reports, Sharma writes that “it is inexplicable to our companies to bear the cost of such a highly discriminatory law.” Sharma must know he’s not going to get a sympathetic ear from Kirk or others in the Obama Administration. Even if they were interested in helping fight this proposal (which they’re probably not), they’re not going to go up against a Senate where there’s rare consensus about the need to sock it to Indian outsourcing companies by charging them more for H-1B or L-1 visas.

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

How unpopular are Indian outsourcing companies from India in the U.S.? They can manage to unite squabbling Democrats and Republicans in the Senate. With the GOP filibustering most of the time, it’s news when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his Democratic colleagues manage to get 60 votes to pass anything at all. Getting all 100 Senators to vote unanimously on a bill is near miraculous. On Thursday, though, the Senate unanimously passed a bill sponsored by New York’s Chuck Schumer to increase visa fees on companies that send workers to the U.S. if more than half of their America-based employees use work visas. In other words, Indian IT outsourcing companies. (Companies like Microsoft and Google that bring people to the U.S. on these work visas, too, don’t have to worry since those employees are just a tiny percentage of their U.S. workforce.) The extra money will pay for additional security measures on the U.S.-Mexico border.

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

Daybreak is happy hour in a world turned upside down at a trendy bar in the Philippines' financial district, the clientele young and loud and with a vague California accent. Vodka cruisers and beer fly by the bucketful as good friends Cici, Pau and Jels go off duty along with the rest of the night shift in the nation's half-million strong business process outsourcing (BPO) workforce. Even the hors d'oeuvres are edgy -- "drunken" shrimp and green mango soaked in pale pilsen -- reflecting the punishing lifestyles of the partygoers. The group of young women really let their hair down on Saturdays, hitting bars, beaches or shopping malls all day so they can socialise with friends outside the industry and sleep at least for one night like a normal person. Life in many ways is a blast for the young, single and educated in the outsourcing industry.

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

Gov. Ted Strickland issued an executive order Friday barring public funding for companies fulfilling state contracts with outsourced labor. Outsourcing job does not reflect Ohio values,” Strickland said in a released statement. Ohioans have been among the hardest hit by more than a decade of unfair trade agreements and the trickle-down economic policies that promoted off-shoring jobs at the expense of Ohioans who work for a living. The move came a little more than a week after reports that the Texas firm hired to administer Ohio’s federally funded appliance- rebate program used workers in Central America as part of the program

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

Is American foreign aid being used to subsidize the creation of overseas jobs that replace US workers? A recent project announced by USAID suggests the answer may be yes. The US Embassy in Sri Lanka announced late last week that it will be funding a new program in the South Asian country that will help train workers to speak English and business managers to take advantage of business outsourcing. The program to teach Sri Lankans how to benefit from outsourcing joins three other projects that USAID, the State Department's foreign aid arm, is funding in the country. Another of these projects involved USAID helping "a major garment manufacturer to expand its operations to northern Sri Lanka. This alliance is expected to initially employ 750 full-time staff and market its finished apparel to such firms as Tommy Hilfiger, Polo Ralph Lauren, Columbia Sportswear, Next, Tesco, and Burberry."

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

Cognizant Technology Solutions outshone its Indian rivals and underlined the superiority of its business model by reporting its strongest ever quarterly performance on Tuesday. Net profit in the April-June period rose 22% to $172.2 million, and revenue surged by $145 million, the strongest increase amongst all IT majors. The Chennai-based firm revised its 2011 guidance upwards, saying that its revenue will now grow by 36%, instead of 25% earlier. The Cognizant scrip jumped nearly 10% to $61.10 on Nasdaq during Tuesday morning trade. The firm is based in the US and derives nearly 60% of its revenue from that market.

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

CSC today announced a 10-year extension to its business process outsourcing (BPO) services agreement with Swiss Re, one of the world's largest and most diversified reinsurers. Under the extension, CSC will continue to provide industry-leading administration for Swiss Re's direct life insurance business through July 2020. Building on a relationship that began in 1995, CSC supports Swiss Re's Admin Re(R) business unit in the United States, one of the highest growth areas for Swiss Re's global life and health segment. Through its Admin Re(R) programs, Swiss Re provides capital and risk solutions to primary life insurance carriers by acquiring blocks of life insurance business, enabling these primary insurers to release capital and gain access to future profit streams from in-force portfolios.

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).

If you had any doubt before, researcher IDC has just demonstrated that pharma manufacturing information management is fast becoming a globally outsourced business. A 49-page report released in July finds that 63 percent of surveyed manufacturers say they outsource some aspect of manufacturing or supply-chain-related IT. That's a 15 percent rise over two years. And 41 percent of those who say they outsource say also that they use a mix of U.S. and non-U.S. service providers. Manufacturing IT capabilities currently ripe for outsourcing: solutions that boost supply chain visibility and monitoring. Analytics and business intelligence solutions also are making their way up the list.

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The above article was extracted from Skyline updates of Skyline College. Skyline College is amongst the top MBA and BBA institutes in Delhi, Gurgaon (NCR).