A strange brew...

Are Western economies fighting back against the threat of offshore outsourcing? Kris Gopalakrishnan is in no doubt. As chief operating officer at Infosys, one of India's 'big five' outsourcing companies, he is exposed to some strange attempts to thwart his company's global outsourcing model.

"The US enforces a minimum wage of $60,000 on every programmer we bring to work there. It charges a $3,000 fee just to process an H-1B visa," he says. That's a serious issue when 15% to 20% of Infosys's workforce is at customer sites in the US and Europe at any one time, and it means that the company finds itself strangely paying the same programmer an annual salary of $3,000 on one project and then 20 times that on the next.

It riles him that the same US companies that are lobbying politicians to make the movement of staff even more costly for Indian companies, and to restrict the numbers of employees that can be transferred to the US, are just as quickly building up their workforces in India and happily taking advantage of the Indian government's zero percent corporate income tax break for anyone 'exporting' IT services or IT-enabled business processes.

As our lead story this month highlights, offshore outsourcing has become a highly-charged political issue - and brought together the most unlikely groupings on either side of the battle lines.

In the 'against' camp are some high-profile US politicians (especially Democrats), picking up on the populist view that white collar jobs are flooding to the developing world. Alongside them are some companies that even see it as a competitive advantage to "just say no" to offshoring. In the UK, the Alliance &Leicester bank, for example, believes it can win customers by saying it won't offshore its call centre-based customer care. And one US PC vendor, MPC, sells its support as "outsourcing-free".

The notables in the 'for' camp are more familiar: the senior management of Global 2000 businesses, who have come to depend on offshoring's compelling economics. And alongside them are politicans of every hue, from George Bush to John Prescott.

That wildcard of political intervention is presenting an unwelcome, additional risk factor for IT executives as they embark on or extend their use of offshore services. And our story, hopefully, adds context to that assessment of the strange brew of IT services, politics and the developing world.