September 24, 2007
U.S. Women Brace for Brazil Challenge
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 5:53 a.m. ET
TIANJIN, China (AP) -- U.S. coach Greg Ryan is bracing for Brazil. He knows the semifinal will be rough, smoothed a bit by the artistry of Marta, the game's best female player.
Brazil won its quarterfinal Sunday at the Women's World Cup, defeating Australia 3-2 on Cristiane's goal in the 75th minute, a rising drive from 20 yards off rapid-fire passes from Marta and Daniela.
The Americans have ambitions for a third World Cup title, following ones in 1991 and '99. Brazil is in the semifinals for the second time, matching its run in 1999.
''I believe finally we will add one more star on our jersey,'' Daniela said, a reference to the men's team, which has won a record five World Cups. ''We will finally get the World Cup.''
The Americans, top-ranked and undefeated in 51 games, advanced Saturday by beating England 3-0 on goals by Abby Wambach, Shannon Boxx and captain Kristine Lilly.
Germany defeated North Korea 3-0 that day, putting the defending champions into a Wednesday semifinal with Norway in Beijing's neighboring city of Tianjin. Three former champions will be playing in the final four.
Norway defeated host China 1-0 on Sunday in Wuhan before a crowd of 52,000 that stayed until the end, waving flags and lighting flares as the Chinese made a last offensive push.
Brazil figures to be quick and tricky Thursday when it meets the Americans in Hangzhou, the last step to the final Sunday in Shanghai.
The U.S. defeated Brazil 2-0 three months ago in New York, a physical game played without Marta. The Americans also defeated Brazil in the 2004 Olympic final -- 2-1 in extra time -- and 2-0 in a group game in the Olympics.
''Brazil's primary tactic was fouling us to break our rhythm,'' Ryan said, referring to the game three months ago. ''We had more of the ball, and their response to that was just to foul. Brazil has tried to break our rhythm by chopping our players down.''
''The last time we played Brazil, they didn't even try to play football -- they just kicked us from behind,'' Ryan added.
Still, Ryan is fully aware that Brazil can play. The women, in some respects, mirror the style of the famed men's teams led over the years by Rivaldo, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho. They also go by a single name, fashioning goals by duping defenders with backheel passes and start-and-stop fakes while hovering over the ball.
''I'm going to do whatever I can to request that we get a referee who understands the difference between a reckless foul and a hard challenge,'' Ryan said, a former defender himself in the now-defunct NASL.
Marta is the 2006 women's world player of the year, and the rest of the lineup isn't far behind with striker Cristiane and other up-front players like Daniela, Formiga and Maycon.
''They are all very creative,'' said U.S. defender Stephanie Lopez, who played against Brazil in New York. ''Sometimes it's not very traditional, but it's very effective. Their offense is very special.''
The Americans' best result of the tournament came against an England team that might have been weaker than any of the other squads in the U.S. group -- North Korea, Sweden and Nigeria. The game turned on three goals in 12 minutes early in the second half.
''I think we've got another gear,'' Ryan said. ''The concern isn't peaking; the concern is winning the next game. I think they can play even better but whether we see it or not just depends on the game, our opponent.''
The United States is undefeated in 51 games, winning mostly in this tournament with defense, set plays and four goals from striker Abby Wambach.
''Every game we've been rising and rising,'' Boxx said. ''We've defended so well in this tournament and now the possession part is coming.''
In Sunday's games:
--Norway's Isabell Herlovsen took advantage of a defensive mistake and scored in the 32nd minute. China, its boisterous fans packing stadiums during the tournament, controlled much of the play in the first half.
--Formiga gave Brazil a 1-0 lead in the fourth minute, scoring on a long shot that went in off the crossbar from 20 yards. Marta converted a penalty kick midway through the first half. Lisa De Vanna and Lauren Colthopre rallied Australia to 2-2 before Cristiane struck in the 75th minute with a blistering shot.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
September 25, 2007
D.E.A. Exposes a Steroid Web With China Tie
By DUFF WILSON and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
Federal authorities said yesterday that they had exposed a sprawling underground distribution network for steroids, human growth hormone and other illicit bodybuilding drugs supplied by 37 companies in China.
The operation revealed a much wider, more diffuse commerce in performance-enhancing drugs than previously known, with a latticework of bathroom and basement manufacturers and distributors. That contrasted with the more centralized drug network from past years that tapped into established pharmaceutical pipelines.
A network of Internet-based chemical wholesalers, anonymous e-mail services and password-protected chat rooms fueled the trade, federal and state officials said.
“There is no kingpin here,” said Steve Robertson, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington. “We’re going after individual distribution cells. There’s no godfather of steroids.”
The D.E.A. estimates that 99 percent of the illegal steroids originate with chemicals from China. Most of the 124 who were arrested in the operation — including 50 over the past week — were charged with distributing chemicals bought in bulk from China, which as host of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing has been under pressure to deliver a drug-free Games. They are accused of setting up labs in their homes, notably on Long Island, to press them into pills or cook them into injectable liquids, the D.E.A. said.
Sales of the products, which are illegal to buy without a prescription and illegal to sell without a license from the D.E.A., were conducted with presumed anonymity on the Internet.
D.E.A. agents are compiling a computerized database of thousands of buyers. No users of the drugs were identified yesterday, although the D.E.A. said it was trying to establish their identities and might share that information with professional sports leagues and antidoping officials if their athletes are involved.
“They may not all be prosecuted, but we will be identifying them,” said John P. Gilbride, a special agent in charge of the D.E.A. office in New York. “We have names. We have addresses. We have thousands of names, but I cannot give you an exact number."
The F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service, the National Drug Intelligence Center and United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement also worked on the two-year investigation, called Operation Raw Deal. In addition to the United States and China, eight other countries were involved in the investigation.
Authorities seized $6.5 million cash, 25 vehicles, 3 boats, 27 pill presses and 71 weapons while executing 143 search warrants at 56 makeshift steroid labs and other locations, the D.E.A. said. Two distribution rings on Long Island alone accounted for more than $13.5 million in steroids, Mr. Gilbride said. One of the suspects, a 36-year-old Melville man arrested Sept. 12 with his mother and wife, committed suicide last week. The family’s lawyer did not return telephone messages.
The investigation grew out of a similar investigation into Mexican steroid manufacturers that targeted eight companies in 2005. At the time, the D.E.A. said Mexico provided 82 percent of illicit steroids seized in the United States, often in veterinary form. The void created the opportunity for American producers and distributors.
Although most of the Chinese companies involved remain unidentified, one of them, GeneScience Pharmaceutical Company, and its chief executive officer, Lei Jin, were indicted last week by a federal grand jury in Rhode Island. GeneScience says it supplies three-fourths of the Chinese human growth hormone market.
Mr. Gilbride, the D.E.A. agent in New York, said Chinese officials were cooperating as the investigation continued around the world.
The drug case comes at a time when the quality of imports to the United States from China has become an issue between the two countries. Tens of thousands of toys made in China have been recalled in recent weeks on suspicion of having unacceptably high level of lead in paint and other hazards for small children. Some Chinese-made toothpaste was found to contain a chemical usually used in automotive antifreeze and not intended for human consumption.
“Today, we reveal the truth behind the underground steroid market: dangerous drugs cooked all too often in filthy conditions with no regard to safety, giving Americans who purchase them the ultimate raw deal,” the D.E.A. administrator Karen P. Tandy said in a statement.
In related actions, the police in Denmark raided 26 locations, and German authorities closed down five illicit labs. Australia, Belgium, Sweden and Thailand also conducted enforcement actions, the D.E.A. said.
Officials at Major League Baseball and the National Football League said yesterday that they would seek information from the investigation that connected any of their players to performance-enhancing drugs.
Rusty Payne, a D.E.A. spokesman in Washington, said: “If we come across names, are we going to provide them to the leagues? That is going to be the decision of the Department of Justice and the United States attorney’s offices that have those aspects of the case."
Antidoping authorities in sports praised the actions. “This investigation has shown that the use of performance-enhancing drugs is an international problem and not just a sports issue but touches all levels of society," Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, said in a telephone interview.
David Howman, the director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency, which oversees testing for the Olympics, said he was optimistic that any athletes connected to the investigation could be disciplined before next summer’s Olympics.
D.E.A. officials said the steroid trade in America centered around bodybuilding. Products, prices and doses for underground laboratory steroids are discussed on Internet forums.
“Bodybuilder discussion boards talked about how you make and use the anabolic steroids and most of all how not to get caught,” Mr. Gilbride said. “I think we put an end to that theory.”
In addition to the masses of steroids seized in the case, federal agents also tracked millions of dollars, much of it in Western Union wire transfers. In cases in San Diego, I.R.S. agents were able to track more than $1.8 million in payments to Chinese manufacturers, according to Tami Stine, the acting assistant special agent in charge of criminal investigations in the I.R.S. office there.
Benedict S. Gullo Jr., the lawyer for Carlos Cuevas, 36, of Hempstead, N.Y., who was charged with two counts of selling steroids, said yesterday that his client was pleading not guilty. “I can tell you to the best of my knowledge there are no superstar athletes on any lists,” Mr. Gullo said.
Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice said the D.E.A. contacted her in the spring asking if she wanted her office to cooperate in a major national investigation. She assigned two investigators.
“We seized drugs with a street-value equivalent to about $13 million,” Ms. Rice said. A Melville location alone had about $7 million of contraband drugs.
“There were rooms filled with drugs,” she said, and the locations were used for some processing as well as for packing and shipping.
“You open up the newspaper and hear about this professional athlete or that one, but the problem is here, in our high schools and gyms,” Ms. Rice said. “This hopefully will serve as a wake-up call to parents, students and coaches of the dangers.”
Steve Green, who lives across the street from the Melville house where a man, his wife and his mother were arrested, said, “All I saw were a lot of D.E.A. agents and a lot of Suffolk County police, and I saw an ambulance come and go.”
William K. Rashbaum and Bruce Lambert contributed reporting.
D.E.A. Exposes a Steroid Web With China Tie
By DUFF WILSON and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
Federal authorities said yesterday that they had exposed a sprawling underground distribution network for steroids, human growth hormone and other illicit bodybuilding drugs supplied by 37 companies in China.
The operation revealed a much wider, more diffuse commerce in performance-enhancing drugs than previously known, with a latticework of bathroom and basement manufacturers and distributors. That contrasted with the more centralized drug network from past years that tapped into established pharmaceutical pipelines.
A network of Internet-based chemical wholesalers, anonymous e-mail services and password-protected chat rooms fueled the trade, federal and state officials said.
“There is no kingpin here,” said Steve Robertson, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington. “We’re going after individual distribution cells. There’s no godfather of steroids.”
The D.E.A. estimates that 99 percent of the illegal steroids originate with chemicals from China. Most of the 124 who were arrested in the operation — including 50 over the past week — were charged with distributing chemicals bought in bulk from China, which as host of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing has been under pressure to deliver a drug-free Games. They are accused of setting up labs in their homes, notably on Long Island, to press them into pills or cook them into injectable liquids, the D.E.A. said.
Sales of the products, which are illegal to buy without a prescription and illegal to sell without a license from the D.E.A., were conducted with presumed anonymity on the Internet.
D.E.A. agents are compiling a computerized database of thousands of buyers. No users of the drugs were identified yesterday, although the D.E.A. said it was trying to establish their identities and might share that information with professional sports leagues and antidoping officials if their athletes are involved.
“They may not all be prosecuted, but we will be identifying them,” said John P. Gilbride, a special agent in charge of the D.E.A. office in New York. “We have names. We have addresses. We have thousands of names, but I cannot give you an exact number."
The F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service, the National Drug Intelligence Center and United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement also worked on the two-year investigation, called Operation Raw Deal. In addition to the United States and China, eight other countries were involved in the investigation.
Authorities seized $6.5 million cash, 25 vehicles, 3 boats, 27 pill presses and 71 weapons while executing 143 search warrants at 56 makeshift steroid labs and other locations, the D.E.A. said. Two distribution rings on Long Island alone accounted for more than $13.5 million in steroids, Mr. Gilbride said. One of the suspects, a 36-year-old Melville man arrested Sept. 12 with his mother and wife, committed suicide last week. The family’s lawyer did not return telephone messages.
The investigation grew out of a similar investigation into Mexican steroid manufacturers that targeted eight companies in 2005. At the time, the D.E.A. said Mexico provided 82 percent of illicit steroids seized in the United States, often in veterinary form. The void created the opportunity for American producers and distributors.
Although most of the Chinese companies involved remain unidentified, one of them, GeneScience Pharmaceutical Company, and its chief executive officer, Lei Jin, were indicted last week by a federal grand jury in Rhode Island. GeneScience says it supplies three-fourths of the Chinese human growth hormone market.
Mr. Gilbride, the D.E.A. agent in New York, said Chinese officials were cooperating as the investigation continued around the world.
The drug case comes at a time when the quality of imports to the United States from China has become an issue between the two countries. Tens of thousands of toys made in China have been recalled in recent weeks on suspicion of having unacceptably high level of lead in paint and other hazards for small children. Some Chinese-made toothpaste was found to contain a chemical usually used in automotive antifreeze and not intended for human consumption.
“Today, we reveal the truth behind the underground steroid market: dangerous drugs cooked all too often in filthy conditions with no regard to safety, giving Americans who purchase them the ultimate raw deal,” the D.E.A. administrator Karen P. Tandy said in a statement.
In related actions, the police in Denmark raided 26 locations, and German authorities closed down five illicit labs. Australia, Belgium, Sweden and Thailand also conducted enforcement actions, the D.E.A. said.
Officials at Major League Baseball and the National Football League said yesterday that they would seek information from the investigation that connected any of their players to performance-enhancing drugs.
Rusty Payne, a D.E.A. spokesman in Washington, said: “If we come across names, are we going to provide them to the leagues? That is going to be the decision of the Department of Justice and the United States attorney’s offices that have those aspects of the case."
Antidoping authorities in sports praised the actions. “This investigation has shown that the use of performance-enhancing drugs is an international problem and not just a sports issue but touches all levels of society," Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, said in a telephone interview.
David Howman, the director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency, which oversees testing for the Olympics, said he was optimistic that any athletes connected to the investigation could be disciplined before next summer’s Olympics.
D.E.A. officials said the steroid trade in America centered around bodybuilding. Products, prices and doses for underground laboratory steroids are discussed on Internet forums.
“Bodybuilder discussion boards talked about how you make and use the anabolic steroids and most of all how not to get caught,” Mr. Gilbride said. “I think we put an end to that theory.”
In addition to the masses of steroids seized in the case, federal agents also tracked millions of dollars, much of it in Western Union wire transfers. In cases in San Diego, I.R.S. agents were able to track more than $1.8 million in payments to Chinese manufacturers, according to Tami Stine, the acting assistant special agent in charge of criminal investigations in the I.R.S. office there.
Benedict S. Gullo Jr., the lawyer for Carlos Cuevas, 36, of Hempstead, N.Y., who was charged with two counts of selling steroids, said yesterday that his client was pleading not guilty. “I can tell you to the best of my knowledge there are no superstar athletes on any lists,” Mr. Gullo said.
Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice said the D.E.A. contacted her in the spring asking if she wanted her office to cooperate in a major national investigation. She assigned two investigators.
“We seized drugs with a street-value equivalent to about $13 million,” Ms. Rice said. A Melville location alone had about $7 million of contraband drugs.
“There were rooms filled with drugs,” she said, and the locations were used for some processing as well as for packing and shipping.
“You open up the newspaper and hear about this professional athlete or that one, but the problem is here, in our high schools and gyms,” Ms. Rice said. “This hopefully will serve as a wake-up call to parents, students and coaches of the dangers.”
Steve Green, who lives across the street from the Melville house where a man, his wife and his mother were arrested, said, “All I saw were a lot of D.E.A. agents and a lot of Suffolk County police, and I saw an ambulance come and go.”
William K. Rashbaum and Bruce Lambert contributed reporting.
September 25, 2007
Outsourcing Works, So India Is Exporting Jobs
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
MYSORE, India — Thousands of Indians report to Infosys Technologies’ campus here to learn the finer points of programming. Lately, though, packs of foreigners have been roaming the manicured lawns, too.
Many of them are recent American college graduates, and some have even turned down job offers from coveted employers like Google. Instead, they accepted a novel assignment from Infosys, the Indian technology giant: fly here for six months of training, then return home to work in the company’s American back offices.
India is outsourcing outsourcing.
One of the constants of the global economy has been companies moving their tasks — and jobs — to India. But rising wages and a stronger currency here, demands for workers who speak languages other than English, and competition from countries looking to emulate India’s success as a back office — including China, Morocco and Mexico — are challenging that model.
Many executives here acknowledge that outsourcing, having rained most heavily on India, will increasingly sprinkle tasks around the globe. Or, as Ashok Vemuri, an Infosys senior vice president, put it, the future of outsourcing is “to take the work from any part of the world and do it in any part of the world.”
To fight on the shifting terrain, and to beat back emerging rivals, Indian companies are hiring workers and opening offices in developing countries themselves, before their clients do.
In May, Tata Consultancy Service, Infosys’s Indian rival, announced a new back office in Guadalajara, Mexico; Tata already has 5,000 workers in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. Cognizant Technology Solutions, with most of its operations in India, has now opened back offices in Phoenix and Shanghai.
Wipro, another Indian technology services company, has outsourcing offices in Canada, China, Portugal, Romania and Saudi Arabia, among other locations.
And last month, Wipro said it was opening a software development center in Atlanta that would hire 500 programmers in three years.
In a poetic reflection of outsourcing’s new face, Wipro’s chairman, Azim Premji, told Wall Street analysts this year that he was considering hubs in Idaho and Virginia, in addition to Georgia, to take advantage of American “states which are less developed.” (India’s per capita income is less than $1,000 a year.)
For its part, Infosys is building a whole archipelago of back offices — in Mexico, the Czech Republic, Thailand and China, as well as low-cost regions of the United States.
The company seeks to become a global matchmaker for outsourcing: any time a company wants work done somewhere else, even just down the street, Infosys wants to get the call.
It is a peculiar ambition for a company that symbolizes the flow of tasks from the West to India.
Most of Infosys’s 75,000 employees are Indians, in India. They account for most of the company’s $3.1 billion in sales in the year that ended March 31, from work for clients like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs.
“India continues to be the No. 1 location for outsourcing,” S. Gopalakrishnan, the company’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview.
And yet the company opened a Philippines office in August and, a month earlier, bought back offices in Thailand and Poland from Royal Philips Electronics, the Dutch company. In each outsourcing hub, local employees work with little help from Indian managers.
Infosys says its outsourcing experience in India has taught it to carve up a project, apportion each slice to suitable workers, double-check quality and then export a final, reassembled product to clients. The company argues it can clone its Indian back offices in other nations and groom Chinese, Mexican or Czech employees to be more productive than local outsourcing companies could make them.
“We have pioneered this movement of work,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan said. “These new countries don’t have experience and maturity in doing that, and that’s what we’re taking to these countries.”
Some analysts compare the strategy to Japanese penetration of auto manufacturing in the United States in the 1970s. Just as the Japanese learned to make cars in America without Japanese workers, Indian vendors are learning to outsource without Indians, said Dennis McGuire, chairman of TPI, a Texas-based outsourcing consultancy.
Though work that bypasses India remains a small part of the Infosys business, it is growing. The company can be highly secretive, but executives agreed to describe some of the new projects on the condition that clients not be identified.
In one project, an American bank wanted a computer system to handle a loan program for Hispanic customers. The system had to work in Spanish. It also had to take into account variables particular to Hispanic clients: many, for instance, remit money to families abroad, which can affect their bank balances. The bank thought a Mexican team would have the right language skills and grasp of cultural nuances.
But instead of going to a Mexican vendor, or to an American vendor with Mexican operations, the bank retained three dozen engineers at Infosys, which had recently opened shop in Monterrey, Mexico.
Such is the new outsourcing: A company in the United States pays an Indian vendor 7,000 miles away to supply it with Mexican engineers working 150 miles south of the United States border.
In Europe, too, companies now hire Infosys to manage back offices in their own backyards. When an American manufacturer, for instance, needed a system to handle bills from multiple vendors supplying its factories in different European countries, it turned to the Indian company. The manufacturer’s different locations scan the invoices and send them to an office of Infosys, where each bill is passed to the right language team. The teams verify the orders and send the payment to the suppliers while logged in to the client’s computer system.
More than a dozen languages are spoken at the Infosys office, which is in Brno, Czech Republic.
The American program here in Mysore is meant to keep open that pipeline of diversity.
Most trainees here have no software knowledge. By teaching novices, Infosys saves money and hopes to attract workers who will turn down better-known companies for the chance to learn a new skill.
“It’s the equivalent of a bachelor’s in computer science in six months,” said Melissa Adams, a 22-year-old trainee. Ms. Adams graduated last spring from the University of Washington with a business degree, and rejected Google for Infosys.
And yet, even as outsourcing takes on new directions, old perceptions linger.
For instance, when Jeff Rand, a 23-year-old American trainee, told his grandmother he was moving to India to work as a software engineer for six months, “she said, ‘Maybe I’ll get to talk to you when I have a problem with my credit card.’ ”
Said Mr. Rand with a rueful chuckle, “It took me about two or three weeks to explain to my grandma that I was not going to be working in a call center.”
Outsourcing Works, So India Is Exporting Jobs
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
MYSORE, India — Thousands of Indians report to Infosys Technologies’ campus here to learn the finer points of programming. Lately, though, packs of foreigners have been roaming the manicured lawns, too.
Many of them are recent American college graduates, and some have even turned down job offers from coveted employers like Google. Instead, they accepted a novel assignment from Infosys, the Indian technology giant: fly here for six months of training, then return home to work in the company’s American back offices.
India is outsourcing outsourcing.
One of the constants of the global economy has been companies moving their tasks — and jobs — to India. But rising wages and a stronger currency here, demands for workers who speak languages other than English, and competition from countries looking to emulate India’s success as a back office — including China, Morocco and Mexico — are challenging that model.
Many executives here acknowledge that outsourcing, having rained most heavily on India, will increasingly sprinkle tasks around the globe. Or, as Ashok Vemuri, an Infosys senior vice president, put it, the future of outsourcing is “to take the work from any part of the world and do it in any part of the world.”
To fight on the shifting terrain, and to beat back emerging rivals, Indian companies are hiring workers and opening offices in developing countries themselves, before their clients do.
In May, Tata Consultancy Service, Infosys’s Indian rival, announced a new back office in Guadalajara, Mexico; Tata already has 5,000 workers in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. Cognizant Technology Solutions, with most of its operations in India, has now opened back offices in Phoenix and Shanghai.
Wipro, another Indian technology services company, has outsourcing offices in Canada, China, Portugal, Romania and Saudi Arabia, among other locations.
And last month, Wipro said it was opening a software development center in Atlanta that would hire 500 programmers in three years.
In a poetic reflection of outsourcing’s new face, Wipro’s chairman, Azim Premji, told Wall Street analysts this year that he was considering hubs in Idaho and Virginia, in addition to Georgia, to take advantage of American “states which are less developed.” (India’s per capita income is less than $1,000 a year.)
For its part, Infosys is building a whole archipelago of back offices — in Mexico, the Czech Republic, Thailand and China, as well as low-cost regions of the United States.
The company seeks to become a global matchmaker for outsourcing: any time a company wants work done somewhere else, even just down the street, Infosys wants to get the call.
It is a peculiar ambition for a company that symbolizes the flow of tasks from the West to India.
Most of Infosys’s 75,000 employees are Indians, in India. They account for most of the company’s $3.1 billion in sales in the year that ended March 31, from work for clients like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs.
“India continues to be the No. 1 location for outsourcing,” S. Gopalakrishnan, the company’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview.
And yet the company opened a Philippines office in August and, a month earlier, bought back offices in Thailand and Poland from Royal Philips Electronics, the Dutch company. In each outsourcing hub, local employees work with little help from Indian managers.
Infosys says its outsourcing experience in India has taught it to carve up a project, apportion each slice to suitable workers, double-check quality and then export a final, reassembled product to clients. The company argues it can clone its Indian back offices in other nations and groom Chinese, Mexican or Czech employees to be more productive than local outsourcing companies could make them.
“We have pioneered this movement of work,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan said. “These new countries don’t have experience and maturity in doing that, and that’s what we’re taking to these countries.”
Some analysts compare the strategy to Japanese penetration of auto manufacturing in the United States in the 1970s. Just as the Japanese learned to make cars in America without Japanese workers, Indian vendors are learning to outsource without Indians, said Dennis McGuire, chairman of TPI, a Texas-based outsourcing consultancy.
Though work that bypasses India remains a small part of the Infosys business, it is growing. The company can be highly secretive, but executives agreed to describe some of the new projects on the condition that clients not be identified.
In one project, an American bank wanted a computer system to handle a loan program for Hispanic customers. The system had to work in Spanish. It also had to take into account variables particular to Hispanic clients: many, for instance, remit money to families abroad, which can affect their bank balances. The bank thought a Mexican team would have the right language skills and grasp of cultural nuances.
But instead of going to a Mexican vendor, or to an American vendor with Mexican operations, the bank retained three dozen engineers at Infosys, which had recently opened shop in Monterrey, Mexico.
Such is the new outsourcing: A company in the United States pays an Indian vendor 7,000 miles away to supply it with Mexican engineers working 150 miles south of the United States border.
In Europe, too, companies now hire Infosys to manage back offices in their own backyards. When an American manufacturer, for instance, needed a system to handle bills from multiple vendors supplying its factories in different European countries, it turned to the Indian company. The manufacturer’s different locations scan the invoices and send them to an office of Infosys, where each bill is passed to the right language team. The teams verify the orders and send the payment to the suppliers while logged in to the client’s computer system.
More than a dozen languages are spoken at the Infosys office, which is in Brno, Czech Republic.
The American program here in Mysore is meant to keep open that pipeline of diversity.
Most trainees here have no software knowledge. By teaching novices, Infosys saves money and hopes to attract workers who will turn down better-known companies for the chance to learn a new skill.
“It’s the equivalent of a bachelor’s in computer science in six months,” said Melissa Adams, a 22-year-old trainee. Ms. Adams graduated last spring from the University of Washington with a business degree, and rejected Google for Infosys.
And yet, even as outsourcing takes on new directions, old perceptions linger.
For instance, when Jeff Rand, a 23-year-old American trainee, told his grandmother he was moving to India to work as a software engineer for six months, “she said, ‘Maybe I’ll get to talk to you when I have a problem with my credit card.’ ”
Said Mr. Rand with a rueful chuckle, “It took me about two or three weeks to explain to my grandma that I was not going to be working in a call center.”
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