Thomas Victor

Infosys Needs to Diversify Out of Body-Shopping

I'm a programmer in a US company and have worked with Infosys and I agree strongly with SanityCheck that INFY is no way a body shopper!

But agree with Sramana that they should move higher up the food chain. They ARE trying hard to be Managemant Consultants similar to McKinsey, Accenture etc. - but besides Finacle, which they've had for ages, why aren't they trying to develop other software products?

Body shopping is a fairly specialised term. A company needs X programmers who say, know Java,for a one year project. There are many company's in India who can supply these programmers. But those companies are not involved with coming up any of the following:

1) Deciding that the company needed the project in the first place
2) High Level IT Design and lower level detailed specifications

The US company itself has done items 1 and 2 finds it needs 15 programmers for this project but only has 12 employees free so it contracts for 3 more 'bodies' from India. Say $25/hour for someone in India, more if they want the programmers to be here in the US.

Infosys pretty much takes on only projects where it does item 2 completely or does item 2 in collaboration with the US company. And it is trying to get to do item 1 also via their ManagementConsulting whih right now is running ata loss.

Usually there are 2 phases for which they might be paid separately, one to come up with Design and Detailed Specs, then to actually program test and go-live.

The only situation where INFY would do body shopping is to get a foothold in the US Company - i.e. the 3 programmers they sent do so well that they can then persuade the Company to let INFY do 100% of the next IT project.

My US Health Care company is spending a HUGE amount of money on a 'do it all' health care package - provides the doctors with everything they need for medical care - patient chart, schedule display, prescription ordering etc etc. PLUS handles the business side such as billing.

From what I've seen, if INFY made an initial investment to study Health Care requirements they could do MUCH better than the software company we have now - come up with a better system, one that is designed to 'scale up', does what the doctors need, does billing etc.- and to maintain and enhance the system.

For the amount of money we're paying we would be happy to go with a better package and better support but there is no alternative on the horizon!