World Bank bans India outsourcer Satyam for 8 years The World Bank has barred India's Satyam Computer Services – the aid institution's largest software vendor and India's fourth-largest outsourcing company – from doing business with it for eight years. On Tuesday, World Bank confirmed earlier reports of the ban in a statement that said Satyam had provided "improper benefits" to …
A lot of people I know have commented negatively on the way British Indians do business - no doubt a legacy of the business culture of India. However public comment on the nature is strictly taboo as it could be construed as racist comments and this indeed, is used as a persuasive method to get discounted prices on the grounds that the vendor is being discriminatory.
While it may benefit the purchaser in the short term, such practices only lends to the distrust of anything Indian, epitomised in the much-hated call-centres and off-shore resources which is seen as yet another unscrupulous Indian business dealing in pinching jobs from the indigenous population.
This report therefore comes as no surprise as yet another underhand business practice in gaining the upper-hand at the cost of gaining a few quick bucks but losing 8 years of business. Wake up India. You want to be a business world power? Then clean up your act.
"News of the barring was first reported in October by Fox News, which further alleges World Bank investigators discovered spy software installed by one or more Satyam contractors on workstations in the bank's Washington DC headquarters.
The World Bank denies these claims, stating "there is no evidence that Satyam was involved in malicious attacks on the Bank's information systems."
Improper gifts are one thing. Maybe missing some paperwork is another. Usually worst case, you lose the contract.
Being banned for 8 years?
When there's smoke, there's a fire. Looks like the world bank is in CYA mode because of the potential repercussion if the story was proven. Since neither World Bank nor Satyam have sued Fox, methinks that there might be some truth the allegations. ;-)
Photon Infotech is another scum bag Indian IT/Software company. These are the guys that download all of the DNS registrations and have people who can only barely speak English make cold calls to the numbers they find there, in violation of ICANN rules and in violation of the FCC's "Do Not Call" list.
while i don't think the outsourcing company we use is malicious, they do suffer from a few other issues.
The main ones we find are misrepresenting skill levels, and an absolute refusal to take any initiative.
If you import an experienced senior developer from India to run a project, you expect a certain level of competence. luckily i had worked with the same person a few months earlier when they were merely sold as an experienced developer, and found out then that their entire developing experience consisted of a 2 day training course on the programming language that we gave them when they arrived.
from my experiences i have started to take the view of never attributing to maliciousness something which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
Hey, guess what, we all work in IT and I'm sure we've all seen something dodgey going on.
With 20 years of hindsight I have to say that there are precious few companies who seriously look very hard at their internal practices - especially IT - because to do things *properly* will inevitably mean an increase in cost, time or both. So what works is deemed to be 'good enough' until a very public failure occurs. In all that time I've only worked for one company that undertook anything close to disaster recovery exercises, for example. Many only find that their backups are flawed when they try to recover a file...
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