US recession not to curb H-1B visa demand

As reported in Computerworld, “Recession unlikely to curb H-1B demand”, and the federal government is going to receive a record number of applications from employers seeking H-1B visas for workers from overseas. Apart from pent-up demand for H-1B visas and many of the largest H-1B users are offshore outsourcing firms, the fact is substantiated by none other than Microsoft’s Chairman Bill Gates at a congressional hearing this month, where he said that the annual visa cap "bears no relation to the U.S. economy's demand for skilled professionals." “…three bills proposing increases in the cap were introduced in Congress shortly after Gates spoke. Congress may make any cap increase retroactive -- a prospect that could encourage companies to submit H-1B applications just to make sure they have a place in line. For those reasons, there's a good chance that the number of H-1B petitions filed this year will exceed last year's total, further reducing the odds of getting a visa unless the cap is increased,” reported the magazine.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar,Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

OutworX President sees Offshore Opportunities in the US recession

OutworX atmosphere is impregnated with expectations. Young Team OutworX always looks up to someone who can be a beckoning light to steer us to newer heights, uncharted zones, and unforeseen opportunities. Meet, Mr.Sanjay Govil, our newly appointed President, in a candid talk with Team NewsworX.

NewsworX: Welcome onboard and Congratulations for being the new President of OutworX. How does it feel?

S.G: My heartfelt thanks to everybody, especially to Rajiv Jain, CEO, OutworX, who has shown trust and faith in me. I have the great honor of stepping into the role of President of OutworX, and I make this move with deep conviction and enthusiasm. To me, OutworX has an incredibly bright future. Previously, I’ve partnered closely with many executive teams to steer strategies and directions, and today I’m looking forward to this challenge.

I firmly believe that we in OutworX have incredible assets, and our company has massive potential, drive, determination and skills, and we won’t be satisfied until the true potential of OutworX gets realized completely.

I am also convinced about our enormous potential for long-term success as a leading Outsourced Product Development & IT Services company.

NewsworX: When someone joins an organization, expectations rise high. What are your short term and long term plans and objectives for the company?

S.G:At the outset, I want to make it clear that short-term plans must be consistent with the long term objectives of a company. So far as short- term plans and objectives are concerned, I am establishing communication with our clients and the teams, trying to understand their capabilities, expectations and challenges. The longer term objective is to focus on growth both in our existing domain of Outsourced Product Development as well as the new area of IT Services. This growth will come from existing clients as well as new clients and new geographies through leveraging our proven competency in Identity & Access Management, Web 2.0 & Open source development, and Quality Assurance.

NewsworX: Give us a brief overview about the industry, keeping in mind the reported recessionary trend in the US economy? Do you see its ripple effect on the Outsourced Product Development market in India? Which are the industry verticals you are currently focusing on?
S.G: There appears to be a slowdown in the US economy, which opens up opportunities for service providers like us since even more US companies would be looking at off-shoring as a strategy to control costs. However there will be price pressures which will require service providers to tighten their belts and deliver “more for less”. But, more importantly, firms have shown faith in India, and they have announced plans to invest several billion $ in the India IT Sector over the next few years. We are in the Outsourced Product Market (OPD), and a number of study reports have reaffirmed the case of Indian supremacy in the OPD market. India accounts for almost 84 per cent of the outsourcing, with competition such as Canada, China and Vietnam way behind. A Nasscom-McKinsey report, states that the outsourced product development market pegged at $3 billion in 2004-05 is growing at 30 per cent annually to touch $8-11 billion by 2008.

NewsworX: How your customers get the benefits of offshore delivery? Could you explain your business model?

S.G:Our goal at OutworX is to work with our clients to help them deliver their products and services competitively in order to maximize their business potential. Our Outsourced Product Development and IT services allow our Clients to reduce time to market, improve the quality of their products, reduce risk of failure, improve predictability and reliability of the engineering process, while helping them lower their over-all product engineering costs.

So far as our business models are concerned our Outsourced Product Development (OPD) business has Flex Cell and Flex Factory models. Our Flex Cell model provides Clients with a team hired to meet their requirements and expectations. And Flex Factory enables clients to harness all the benefits of offshoring and outsourcing, without committing to usage of specific resources. In IT Services we offer the flexibility of “turnkey projects” and resource augmentation delivery models to our Clients.

NewsworX: Anything you would like to share with TeamOutworX? Plz…specify.

S.G: In order for us to be successful in our business, we need to make our clients succeed in their business, which can only happen through constantly delivering high quality products and services, on-time and at competitive prices. Finally, my profound thanks to Team OutworX for showing faith and trust in me.
Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

Can Facebook be Built in India?

Recently I had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion on outsourcing, titled – Building Facebook in Bangalore: Outsourcing 2.0 – it had a good mix of panelists – one early stage investor, couple of entrepreneurs, and one CEO of a boutique outsourcing firm. Entire discussion was focused on panelists’ perceptions on differences between culture of Indian engineers and the culture of Web 2.0 companies – and at the end their conclusion was that it is very painful, if not impossible, to build Facebook kind of services in India.

I do not subscribe completely to the conclusion drawn by our panelists. I believe that some of the most attractive and sustainable consumer oriented Web (2.0) services can be built by engineers sitting in India. And, I argue that three cultural traits of Indians, i.e. diversity, adaptability and entrepreneurship, make the Indian minds rightly suited for doing so.

Cultural diversity has never been new to Indians. A country that is built with democratic fiber, rapid globalization, and a very successful and unshackled media, has exposed Indians to far reaching global cultural diversity. Adaptability trait of Indians has trained Indian minds to always listen, understand, and adopt the alternate viewpoints, much more easily than other countries, once this exposure is made. And finally, entrepreneurial Indian mind is always looking for ways to make a “useful” enterprise out of everything new they learn through this exposure.

This makes Indian minds lot more similar to Silicon Valley minds that start and build great Internet businesses.

However, having said that, there must be some reason why panelists’ with their experience with outsourcing were converging on the conclusion that they did. Yes, there are a few reasons, most important of all is picking the Right set of people and motivating them to do work for them. Often people go into outsourcing with misplaced convictions, some of them were clearly resonated by panelists – “I would save 80% in labor cost”, “I would not hire engineers with top school education because attrition is very high in that group” etc.

Second important factor is attention deficiency disorder in Indian engineers. This often goes hand in hand with entrepreneurial trait as well as competitive job market in India. Indian engineers work very hard to reach the 90th milestone but after that their minds often get attracted towards other new things, and they do not give same rigor to last 10 milestones- often referred as “finishing touches” or “final packaging” – this is where their American counterparts building consumer products are clearly differentiable – Americans understand very well that packaging plays a huge role in attracting consumers to products even in a crowded market.

At OutworX, we strongly believe in building the right teams. We hire the right people, and motivate them to highest levels. We do not believe in conventional thinking and do not let misplaced convictions distract us from our goal of building the right teams. We train our engineers to understand that race never ends on 90th milestone, it just gets more competitive in final 10.

We recognize the above three cultural traits of Indian minds, we create an open environment in the organization that exploits these three traits to fullest and further nurtures them in the minds of our engineers.

Yes, Facebook can be built in Bangalore. But what is more important is whether your idea, that is generation ahead of Facebook, can be built in India?

My answer is resounding Yes. Talk to any OutworX engineer to see for yourself how.

Posted by Rajiv Jain, CEO, OutworX Corporation