I ran into this interesting article on the Computerworld blogs and the upcoming trend is that the IT workers in the U.S. will eventually have to equalize with workers in other parts of the world in order to stay competitive.

IBM is increasingly outsourcing the IT work to India while keeping the high paid executives here in the U.S. (sound familiar?) to manage offshore teams. I guess its sort of like Walmart buying cheap chinese goods and selling back to the consumers here in the U.S but instead its technology being developed in places like India and China and being resold back to the U.S. corporations.

From the article:

Ron Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and author of Outsourcing America, says this chart represents a departure point for IBM.

“I think this moment was so important because it was when Big Blue made the fateful decision to compete by substituting low cost workers in India and elsewhere for high-cost American workers,” said Hira. “Instead of choosing to compete by investing in better tools, technologies, and training for their American workforce, they chose to compete their American workers head to head with workers in other countries who can afford to be paid less. And they gave those workers in low-cost countries the same, or better, tools, technologies and training, as their American workforce,” he said.

Is IT the next domino to fall?

Spots 1-5 are:

1. IBM Roadrunner (1.026 petaflop/s) at U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory
2. IBM BlueGene/L system (478.2 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
3. IBM BlueGene/P (450.3 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory
4. Sun SunBlade x6420 “Ranger” system (326 teraflop/s) at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas – Austin
5. Cray XT4 “Jaguar” (205 teraflop/s) at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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