Marketing Ninja

Today I got a call from an employer who wanted to set up a lunch meeting to discuss a possible internship; I wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary until my contact dropping the following bombshell on me:

We were outsourcing our test cycle to a firm in India that specializes in this kind of software testing, but as a result of two major undersea cables being damaged late last night we’ve been unable to feasibly work with that firm. We’re now looking for interns who can assist us with the testing cycle.

India’s bandwidth has been reduced by 50%, according to Fox News. Ouch.

That means that a lot of Indian firms that collaborate with U.S. firms using VoIP and real-time collaboration tools are going to have to rely on satellite-based Internet connections and other lower bandwidth forms of collaboration. That can’t be good for the productivity of these outsource specialists.

AjaxNinja has a lot of Indian subscribers; I was wondering why our RSS subscribership dropped this morning despite posting a month-high traffic day yesterday. India’s internet outage might have something to do with it.

The Implications for U.S. Firms

This isn’t the first time that large regions of Asia have had massive Internet outages; Southeast Asia suffered large Internet outages after undersea cables were damaged by an earthquake in 2006. The question here is though, how much business will outsourcing firms lose as a result of the Internet outages? In the previous outage, Internet was not restored to Southeast Asia until two months later. If that’s the case again, then I predict a significant decline in the amount of U.S. firms that rely on outsourced labor for various information technology-related needs.

To cover it point-by-point:

• U.S. Firms are not optimistic about the timeframe for restoring the undersea cables; the employer who contacted me said "we expect it will be up to 2 months before they get their service restored; we simply cannot wait that long."
• This incident may damage the reputation of outsourced firms; if India’s infrastructure is so fragile that damage to two undersea cables in the Mediterranean can wipe out the Internet all over the sub-continent, then what’s to stop this from happening again in the future?
• Speaking as someone who is going to graduate with a B.S. in C.S. in may, I think I just saw my average starting salary increase upon hearing this news. Firms with an urgent need for I.T. people are going to be hiring more Americans for labor that would traditionally be outsourced.
• U.S. Firms are going to get hit in the pocketbooks by the inability to communicate with partners in India; if the U.S.IT firms have to rely on an increase in labor from America counter-parts, then the costs of I.T. are going to go up.

Overall, my job prospects for graduation were already looking pretty good; they look great now.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!