Welcome to the world of offshoring. Outsourcing of business processes, offshoring of IT services and solutions from the United States to India have been going on for several years, but of late the trend appears to be looping in a host of other services as well, if Fusion Technologies' offshoring is any indication. "We decided to offshore our front office functions to Hyderabad because of two factors: The cost, of course, and the high attrition rate," says Richard Napoli, CEO of Fusion Technologies, in a video conference meeting from Edison.
"It's an interesting job, and there are two of us to handle the front office work from 5.30 pm to about 4 am on weekdays," says Ms Budhiraju, between chatting up with a visitor in New Jersey in real-time, asking him whether he wanted a cup of coffee.
"Front office is not the only thing we do offshore. The model is used to create work groups between our offices in the US and in Hyderabad, organise demos of new software for clients. It helps our engineers to rectify glitches in real-time," says Mr Napoli, who has been an evangelist for offshoring for years. "While IT services and call centres are big offshoring and outsourcing opportunities, there is a trend to offshore other work as well, like recruitment," says Sarath Sura, managing director of Sierra Atlantic, an application integration company with offices in Hyderabad and the US. "We have started recruitment of people in the US by recruiters working out of our Hyderabad facilities," says Mr Sura. "When the offshore recruitment started, we had two recruiters in the US. Now we have only one, with two recruiters in Hyderabad."
Mr Napoli claims that offshoring work had led to the creation of more jobs at Fusion Technologies in the US. "Earlier, we had about 40 people in the US, paying them American salaries. After we began offshoring work like software code writing, we had let go some people in the US. We have begun hiring more marketing people in the US now, as more and more work is being offshored to India," says Mr Napoli. "Offshoring of IT jobs is no longer an issue in the US," he adds.
