New Trends in Global Offshore Outsourcing: A Comparative Assessment of India and China

Abstract

With the rapid rise of globalization, the challenge of global outsourcing today is not “Why and what to outsource?” but “How to outsource?” The theme today is “Let us do it right the first time.” The barriers to outsourcing are companies’ own mind-sets, local regulations, and the robustness of their internal processes. The domain knowledge in many industries has gone fully global. Likewise, new product development and R&D must be global in order to compete in emerging economies and to tap into global talent to compete globally. Software development and IT outsourcing can be done from anywhere, virtually! The availability of mobile technology and superior digital infrastructure is giving way to “distributed IT,” making “homes” as the future nodes of outsourcing factories. China and India have emerged as the major leaders in this industry due to their capacity, talent pool, and lower cost structure. This chapter compares their strengths, challenges, and growth potential based on the authors’ own hands-on experience of doing outsourcing in these countries for the past 15 years.