{"id":2075,"date":"2016-11-09T11:40:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-09T11:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/projects\/horsesforsources\/trump-offshore-deathknell_110916\/"},"modified":"2016-11-09T11:40:00","modified_gmt":"2016-11-09T11:40:00","slug":"trump-offshore-deathknell_110916","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/trump-offshore-deathknell_110916\/","title":{"rendered":"President Trump is the death-knell for traditional offshore outsourcing… as we know it"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Addendum note:<\/em><\/p>\n Since I penned this blog, Senator Chuck Schumer\u00a0has been made Senate Minority Leader. \u00a0Schumer\u00a0has been the biggest and most active opponent of offshore outsourcing, in the US government, for the last several years – we even wrote about his failed H1B bill back in 2010<\/a> after his infamous branding of Infosys<\/a> as a “chop shop”. \u00a0Net-net – with Trump’s aggressive stance on protecting US jobs, massively raising the H1B minimum wage, combined with the determination of Schumer\u00a0leading the Democratic Party faction, this does not bode well for the future of the offshore business for at least the next four years.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n President Trump is the death-knell for traditional offshore outsourcing… as we know it<\/span><\/p>\n The traditional Indian-dominated offshore IT services market was already in the throes of desperation to find a new path for itself. Much of the global 2000 has already been pulling back on the traditional \u201cmega deal\u201d, amidst intense competition between a surplus of IT services providers and an increasingly desire to parse out smaller contracts to multiple suppliers.<\/p>\n The election of Mr Trump to the Oval pretty much just hammered in the final nail in the coffin for the traditional IT outsourcing market as we know it. The Republicans control the House, the Senate and Trump has a huge mandate to impose his will, not dissimilar from Obama and his healthcare reforms. \u00a0Change is going to happen and it will likely have a very significant impact on global IT and BPO service delivery.<\/p>\n Why is this bad news for offshore services industry?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Temporary IT workers will likely be massively hit.<\/strong> Trump\u2019s campaign has already outwardly promoted raising the H1B minimum salary to $100,000 per year (from $60K). This makes managing complex IT projects a lot more expensive and negate much of the cost advantage for complex engagement requiring \u201clanded\u201d IT staff. For the IT community of several hundred thousand H1Bs, L1s and B1 holders currently residing in the US, many of them will come under scrutiny if Trump holds true to his number one campaign promise<\/a> \u2013 curbing immigration and protecting American jobs. So this doesn\u2019t just spell bad news for the competitive of new IT services deals, it also threatens the viability of existing long-term engagements.\u00a0<\/p>\n Enterprises will increasingly look to cloud-based solutions.<\/strong> With the cost of maintaining legacy ERP systems likely to spiral, many enterprises will be forced to write off legacy sooner than they may have wished and invest in cloud-based enterprise solutions that require less offshore labor components. Much of the Indian IT services industry, for example, grew up on supporting and maintaining now-legacy IT environments, such as on-premise SAP systems. While many long-term\u00a0engagements will have already be well past the “labor arbitrage stage” and hard for the Trump administration to police, all US businesses engaging with large numbers of offshore services will become under increasing scrutiny. \u00a0If there was ever a time to make investments in standardized IT solutions that do not have a heavy offshore dependence, this is it.<\/p>\n Automation is now the new labor arbitrage – and Donald just made it happen.<\/strong>\u00a0Forget Brexit<\/a>, Trump is now the new true friend of the fledgling\u00a0automation industry (and he probably doesn’t even realize\u00a0it). One of his last speeches was centered on his berating of IBM for offshoring\u00a0a bunch of jobs from Minneapolis<\/a>. \u00a0Offshoring is often a prerequisite to automation… just look at the manufacturing industry where the work is initially moved to overseas factories, before being automated within those factories (or brought\u00a0back on shore to factories employing\u00a0a much smaller workforce). \u00a0Just look at many car plants today which may have employed thousands of workers just 20 years ago, which now only need to employ barely a hundred. \u00a0IT is no different and the tools are now in place to accelerate automation of IT and business processes faster than most people realize. \u00a0With the use of IT labor now under so much more scrutiny, the service providers can no longer ignore the fact they need to pivot their delivery\u00a0models away from labor scale even faster than they had feared. \u00a0As we analyzed earlier this year<\/a>, 9% of outsourcing jobs are likely to be displaced by automation over the next 5 years, but that number could be reached in two or three in this new climate. \u00a0<\/p>\n