http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/7222075.htm
Posted on Sun, Nov. 09, 2003
Oracle's Second ****ft 'Follows the Sun' in India while Silicon Valley
Sleeps
By Aaron Davis, San Jose Mercury News, Calif. Knight Ridder/Tribune
Business News
Nov. 9--HYDERABAD, India - Much like Silicon Valley during the boom,
software giant Oracle is constantly scouting India's top tech schools,
offering free cars, housing allowances and flexible work schedules to
the country's best and brightest engineers.
Together, the company's glossy development centers in Hyderabad and
Bangalore are now its largest research and development facilities
outside of its headquarters in Redwood Shores. And construction cranes
are set to break ground on a new state-of-the-art campus in Hyderabad,
complete with a 1,000-car garage, library, weight room and exercise
fields.
"Constant hiring, constant construction. It's like the boom," said
Murali Subramanian, Oracle India's vice president for e-business
development in Hyderabad.
What's fueling the expansion is Oracle's adoption of a "follow the
sun" model for software development. It means creating duplicate
research centers around the world so that when engineers in Redwood
Shores are done for the day, they can hand off their project to
engineers in India, compressing two ****fts of software design into a
single day.
To accomplish this, the database software giant is hiring engineers at
a rate of more than four each work day in India, expanding its
workforce in the country from 3,000 to 4,000 by the end of 2004.
Other major technology companies are on a similar hiring spree in
India. Intel, for example, will triple its employment in India by the
end of 2005 to 3,000. Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft are also
expanding their Indian workforces.
U.S. tech companies are scooping up Indian talent for just about every
type of technical work, including the most sophisticated
software-design jobs that were once a hallmark of Silicon Valley.
The companies are drawing on India's highly skilled labor force and
recent improvements in Internet communications to turn software
development into a super-efficient, always-on operation spanning the
globe.
When the work day ends in California, it's early morning in India.
Oracle engineers in Redwood Shores, through e-mails and conference
calls, hand off work to counterparts in India. With ubiquitous paper
cups of chai, or tea, strewn around their speaker phones, the Indians
work as employees in the U.S. sleep.
By 9 p.m., India time, the projects are sent along high-speed Internet
lines that s**** across India, the Middle East and Britain, under the
Atlantic, and back to Redwood Shores. In a stream of late-night phone
calls, e-mails and instant messages, the Indians hand the work back to
the Americans. Oracle's U.S. employees return to work to find
overnight enhancements, added design and completed quality tests. In
short, a second day's worth of development -- done.
Oracle's increasing reliance on its low-cost operation in India over
the past decade provides a glimpse of why more and more of the
valley's most sophisticated jobs are headed here.
Engineers in Hyderabad and Bangalore have proven as adept as those in
America at developing and refining Oracle's flag****p database software
and its entire suite of business applications.
The company has even added sales, marketing, and consulting jobs in
India and provides technical sup****t from there to customers from
around the world.
"A client can call Oracle at 4 p.m. with a problem, they pass it to
us, and by the next morning, we return a proposed solution," said
Krishnamurthy "Krishna" Seetharama, director of server technologies
for Oracle India, as he described an overnight fix made in India for a
database of dangerous materials kept by the San Francisco Fire
Department.
"There's no distinction between the U.S. or India when it comes to
working on the latest cutting-edge software design," says an
Australian narrator in a flashy Oracle video that the company shows to
prospective Indian employees.
"The pitch is 'Work in the U.S. Live in India,'" said L.
Gopalakrishnan, or "Gopal," Oracle India's director for platform
technologies. "Whatever is done in headquarters is also done here. The
work has come to us."
Virtually every major valley software firm now employs this
follow-the-sun approach to send critical work to India. Chip design,
biotech and other sectors are embracing it too.
The globe-spanning process hasn't always gone so smoothly. Sometimes,
cultural differences have come into play, and things have gotten lost
in translation. Other times, technical glitches and sheer distance
have bogged down work.
A massive 6.7 earthquake that struck Algeria in May, for example,
damaged Oracle's dedicated Internet connection with headquarters in
California, dramatically slowing down Oracle India's productivity for
two days. The company has since built a redundant high-speed
connection going in the opposite direction around the world, through
Singa****e and across the Pacific.
And the company often has to navigate cultural differences. To retain
technical talent in India, for instance, Oracle India has started
conducting cl***** to coach female employees on balancing professional
aspirations with cultural pressures to stay home with family.
Oracle formed its Indian subsidiary in 1993. At first, a couple dozen
engineers worked for the company on a project-by-project basis.
In 1996, however, Oracle India was given three months to develop a new
product from scratch: software to access information stored on
servers. With a deep desire to prove itself, the Indian team worked
non-stop, shattering its deadline and delivering a second-generation
version within three months.
It was the first product that Oracle India delivered on its own. The
feat turned the head of Oracle Founder and Chief Executive Larry
Ellison and helped transform the India operation from a small
development division to a strategic core of the company.
Four years ago, Oracle adopted the follow-the-sun model, taking
advantage of India's abundance of technical talent and labor costs
that are a fraction of U.S. wages. A software engineer in India
typically earns $15 to $20 an hour, compared with salaries that can
reach $120 an hour in the United States. Even with perks like free
Hyundais, health insurance and international travel, the cost to
Oracle for engineers here runs less than half of that in the United
States.
Oracle's new seven-acre campus in Hyderabad will allow the company to
eventually field 6,000 workers in India -- the goal of Oracle's
"Emerald India" blueprint for the country.
For Oracle and other U.S. tech companies, there's a growing desire to
build a presence in a country that's increasingly im****tant as a
customer. Today, nearly 60 percent of Oracle's sales come from outside
the United States, and India is the company's fifth-largest market in
Asia, with more than 6,000 customers. So, in many ways, Oracle is as
much as following the market as following the sun.
"The idea that Oracle India is simply for cost savings, I find that so
offensive," said Jennifer Glass, Oracle vice president for
communications.
"It's naive for people to think you can overnight save a lot of money.
It takes time to build up infrastructure and hire skilled workers,"
Glass said. "We've done that and now we're reaping the benefits."
-----
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