Offshore Advocates Woo Silicon Valley ...

Computerworld - ... execs and denounce politicians who campaign against the shipping of U.S. high-tech jobs abroad. At the Software 2004 conference in San Francisco last week, Romesh Wadhwani, chairman of Symphony Technology Group LLC in Palo Alto, Calif., exhorted an audience of 1,100 IT vendor honchos, including 400 CEOs, to get on the offshore bandwagon in order for their companies to have a viable, profitable future. "Most software companies that reinvent their business model will use offshore in a large and strategic, not tactical, way," he argues. Translation: More software development work is heading to India. As Computer Associates CEO Sanjay Kumar remarks, "If you work behind a computer screen, your job is up for grabs."
• Some politicians' jobs may hinge on their positions on outsourcing IT work to India, and a few are getting critical of the trend, which amuses Wadhwani. He quips, "You know when politicians say something is bad, that's a good thing."
• In an often rambling and disjointed keynote talk at the same event, Ray Lane also endorsed the exodus of U.S. jobs to India. The former chief operating officer of Oracle Corp. who's now a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Silicon Valley's leading venture-capital firm, claimed that for every IT development dollar sent to Bangalore, $1.14 gets generated in the U.S. Pointing to the distinction between the two political parties on the issue, Lane concludes, "You should be able to figure out how I'm going to vote in November."
• Charles Stevenson keeps his politics to himself, but he readily shares his views on outsourcing. He is the chief technology officer as well as COO at Gupta Technologies LLC, a database and software tools vendor in Redwood Shores, Calif. As such, he's intimate with the tactical value of outsourcing. After all, he cut five quality assurance jobs and gave the work to Sonata Software Ltd. in Bangalore. But he says he did so to protect 68 workers in the U.S. He suggests the views of Wadhwani and Lane "are completely out of sync with the reality of innovation." He explains that face-to-face collaboration is key for critical product architecture, design and core development work. By tactically adding Sonata's quality assurance work, he's able to push projects out the door 33% faster. This is true, in part, because his California programmers can see Sonata's analysis of their previous day's coding when they reach their desks in the morning. With an in-house quality assurance team, there would be another day in between to