IT pros prepare as war in India looms

Computerworld - The escalating tension between India and Pakistan is prompting U.S. outsourcing clients to review the disaster preparedness of software development firms in both countries.

The scrutiny covers aspects such as the developers' network redundancy, their access to backup communications circuits, their systems documentation practices and their ability to quickly move key personnel and processes to safer locations in Europe and North America.

There is no indication that the situation has caused any major U.S. corporations to pull out of projects in the region, analysts and vendors said. But they're putting contingency plans in place.

"We are critically concerned, especially by the nature of the conversation regarding the use of nuclear weapons," said Jim Beattie, chief technology officer at CCC Information Services Inc., a Chicago-based company that provides IT services to the automotive claims and collision-repair industries.

CCC is working on a joint application development project in India with Cognizant Technology Solutions Inc., a Teaneck, N.J.-based vendor with operations in that nation.

As a result of the escalating tensions, CCC has had discussions with Cognizant about the latter's backup and recovery schemes and its ability to move people to locations in the U.S., including to CCC's facilities if need be, at short notice.

"We are very anxious to maintain our relationship with Cognizant," Beattie said. "But the situation in India has certainly changed the risk profile" associated with doing projects there, he said.

Baltimore-based asset management firm T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. has outsourced several projects to Covansys Inc. in Farmington Hills, Mich. Covansys does work for T. Rowe Price in facilities in both the U.S. and India.

Now, T. Rowe Price is looking at how much it will cost to conduct some of the work in India out of Covansys' facilities in the U.S. "In the worst-case scenario, our plan is to use their off-site resources [in the U.S] to complete our offshore projects," said Ram Mouli, vice president of technology planning at T. Rowe Price. "We are looking at how the rates will increase" by doing that, he added.

Kingsport, Tenn.-based Eastman Chemical Co. already has contingency plans to bring offshore work back in-house, if it has to, said Jerry Hale, vice president and CIO of the firm.

All Talk So Far

But despite the clearly heightened concern, no one is talking about pulling out of projects in India yet, insisted executives at several Indian software companies.

"People are more keen to understand our business continuity and disaster recovery plans," said Phaneesh Murthy, a vice president at Infosys Technologies Ltd., a Bangalore, India-based company whose clients include Fidelity Investments, Visa International Inc. and J.C. Penney Co.