Businessweek has an article highlighting how some of the Indian IT Services firms are begining to hire more in the US. Excerpts from the same:

In the past, Indian companies almost always transferred Indians to work in the U.S. on temporary visas. But now Infosys and other Indian outfits are hiring aggressively in the U.S.

"The work we're doing requires more and more knowledge of the customers' businesses, and you want local people to do that," says Wipro Chairman Azim H. Premji. Today only 2.5% of Wipro's global workforce is non-Indian, but the company wants to boost that to more than 10% in a few years.

Wipro Ltd., for instance, is Scouting U.S. locations for two big software writing centers that eventually could employ hundreds of programmers each. Cities on its short list include Austin, Tex., and Atlanta, because of their deep tech- talent pools and reasonable salary costs.

"If we can hire close to our clients, we don't have to bring in somebody from India on an H-1B," says S. Padmanabhan, human resources chief for Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS), India's largest outsourcing firm. About 1,000 of TCS's10,000 U.S.-based workers are Americans (out of 90,000 total employees worldwide). And it plans to hire an additional 2,000 Americans within three years.

Surprisingly, it often costs more to ship in Indians on a temporary basis than it does to hire Americans. Base salaries are comparable, because Indian companies must by law pay market rates for people they bring in on work visas.Also, as the Indian rupee has risen more than 10% against the dollar this year, hiring Americans has gotten cheaper. At the same time, fierce competition for tech talent in India is pushing salaries there up by 12% to 15% per year, although they remain less than a third of those in the U.S.

Source: 1

Tags: offshore - india - outsource - hire - workforce

Prashanth Rai