A number of articles in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times on the Indian software industry.
WSJ writes about NRIs returning back to India to jobs in India. “Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of Indian engineers moved to the U.S. for jobs, adventure and Silicon Valley wealth. Now, the U.S. job market is lousy and the government is tightening the rules on immigrants…In India, engineers find ample jobs, thanks largely to Western companies trying to cut costs. Salaries are much lower, but so is the cost of living.”
Another article in WSJ looks at how Indian tech companies are luring employees of Western firms in their efforts to win bigger contracts. “These high-profile hires are a big part of the Indian companies’ strategies for winning the biggest contracts, valued over $100 million each, that largely still elude them. They are also part of their push to provide more complex and expensive services, such as computer-strategy consulting, to match their brand-name American and European rivals. The North American and West European markets for computer services are valued at about $422 billion this year, according to research firm Gartner Inc., making them a juicy target.”
A NYTimes story looks at the Indian operations of various US companies doing top-end patentable work. “In clusters of modern low- and high-rise office buildings set amid acres of lush greenery here, thousands of engineers are hard at work, writing software for the latest telephones, designing next-generation microprocessors and developing wireless broadband technology. The work of these engineers is generating significant amounts of intellectual property for American companies like Cisco Systems, General Electric, I.B.M., Intel, Motorola and Texas Instruments – whose various Indian units have filed more than 1,000 patent applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Some applications, with patents already granted, date to the early 1990’s. But most applications from India have been filed in the last two years and still await decisions by the patent examiners in Washington.”
