So what if the Indian staff are trained ?

It does not really matter if the Indian staff are "sufficiently trained", does it ?

Because they will leave.

Staff turnover in Indian support centres is huge, and so even if the Clot staff were up to speed, 6 months from now they won't be.

As the learned respondent earlier pointed out, these contracts are driven by price, not quality, and so the bidders will not try very hard to retain good staff, since they can replace them with cheaper ones, and not spend much on training

Also, the good ones they keep can be moved to show prospective clients the quality of their people. The incentive is to get business, not satisfied customers.

In that, there is no real difference between outsourcing to India, or to a firm in your home town.

However, the short term savings look good enough to earn bonuses executives, especially accountants, .so they do not really care all that much.

That being said, there is something quite special in the culture at Colt. Why did they not outsource years ago when if was fashionable ?

If you'd met Colt executives, then you'd know why.

They are only dimly aware that they are a telecoms company, and I disagree with the earlier poster who said they hate boffins. That is true of middle management at Colt, but the senior execs don 't really meet techies enough to hate or like them. They have the same understanding and relationship with technology that the Queen has when she opens a high energy physics lab. Like the Queen, they are polite to the greasemonkeys, feign interest, and then go to lunch to chat about golf.

I was going to use Prince Phillip as the example there, but he actually has an interest in technology, something Colt board members would regard as making the Prince their social inferior. I don't think he even plays golf, so certainly is not qualified to be an exec at Colt.

Offshoring isn't automatically bad..and another classic COLT story

Gotta say, there are an awful lot of very bright Indians out there. So don't assume that just because colt are outsourcing to bangalore or wherever that they're going to get idiots. And let's face it, given colt's record things might actually improve.

My favorite COLT story comes from a friend who had to support an app running on colt's servers. They called up one day in a tiz cos the servers had dropped off the network. Obviously an outrageous outage. Could he find out wtf was going on?

Few hours later, turns out that the techs in the CO had decided the servers couldn't be very importasnt cos no one ever visited them so they pulled them out of the racks and stuffed them in a Transit van. Stellar.