Immigration Reform May Spur Software Robotics 146
dcblogs writes "The Senate's immigration bill may force the large offshore outsourcing firms to reduce their use of H-1B visa-holding staff, forcing them to hire more local workers and raising their costs. But one large Indian firm, Infosys, will try to offset cost increases with software robotics. Infosys recently announced a partnership with IPsoft, a New York-based provider of autonomic IT services. With IPsoft's tools, work that is now done by human beings, mostly Level 1 support, could be done by a software machine. Infosys says that IPsoft tools can 'reduce human intervention.' More colorfully, Chandrashekar Kakal, global head of Infosys's business IT services, told the Times of India, that 'what robotics did for the auto assembly line, we are now doing for the IT engineering line.' James Slaby, a research director of HFS Research who has been following the use of autonomics closely, wrote in a recent report that the IPsoft partnership may help Infosys 'reap fatter margins by augmenting and replacing expensive, human IT support engineers with cheaper, more accurate, efficient automated processes,' and by improving service delivery."
Re:Wut? (Score:4, Insightful)
"The autonomic tools that IPsoft makes are designed to bring software robotic automation and machine learning to routine IT functions, such as help desks, operations and infrastructure management. In other words, with IPsoft's tools, work that is now done by human beings could be done by a software machine."
it's either more automatic phone reply machines or possibly more of the way of doing business where instead of calling an amazon guy to setup you a new server, you use their tools to deploy the server yourself and amazon doing a robo-call to test if you're the person you say you are and instead of calling amazons support you look up their faq on their site.
dressing it in 10 paragraphs of bullshit makes a better article - for computer world. also it makes it sound more unique, which it certainly isn't, since we've been using amazon for a while with zero human interaction with sales, support or anyone.
Software Robotics?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that's called software. No robotics needed.
Wipro and Infosys two companies that should die (Score:5, Insightful)
Both Wipro and Infosys are the worst in terms of H1-B visa abuse and should not be allowed to operate in this country.
http://profit.ndtv.com/news/industries/article-us-senator-accuses-infosys-wipro-tcs-of-abusing-h-1b-visas-321282 [ndtv.com]
But, unfortunately they're connected with Washington's elite and throw money around in DC to keep things like the H1-B program alive. Remember that during the next election cycle.
Re:Bound to work... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ironically, it'd likely work just as well as hiring Indian help-desk staff.
I suspect Infosys (an Indian company) will likely end up stabbing their own jobs market in the gut with this one, should it take off.
Re:Bound to work... (Score:4, Insightful)
But on the upside, we the customer, will be able to understand the bots MUCH easier than we currently can the Indian named "Bob" on that support call.
Re:It's a problem since it's based on fraud and ab (Score:4, Insightful)
Wages are leveling out.
My main point of irritation is that I can't legally buy movies, medicine, software development packages, and many other products for the extremely low price the same corporations legally sell them to indians and chinese for.
I have to pay $19.99 for a movie selling legally in china for $2.49.
I have to pay $5.00 a day for blood pressure medication selling legally in india for 10 cents.
It's ILLEGAL for someone to buy a bunch over there and ship it back here and sell the movies for $3.49 and the pills for 20 cents (100% mark up).
A few years ago Microsoft was GIVING development suites to indians free while I had to pay $750 for the same product.
Indian wages (as of novermber 2012) were going up 20%. China is seeing 12% to 100% annual wage inflation.
It's been a long painful walk, but sometime in the next 4-8 years it won't be worth it to offshore any more. These automation programs are a leading edge. Infosys also is trying to rebrand themselves from being a company that sells legions of code monkeys and grunt programmers to a company that sells managers and ceos. That's also a sign of the increasing wage structure.
I was lucky. I lived on half of what I made since 2000 and I was able to retire early. Now I do massage therapy, draw, and paint for fun. I'm looking at doing some programming for fun but haven't done so yet. Either Libreoffice (I read they are friendly), or Android (for my dnd game), or some kind of board gaming table software.
Re:Bound to work... (Score:3, Insightful)
The best and the brightest (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmm, so H1B's go to the best and the brightest 1st line support engineers that can be replaced by software, really?
Re:programming is not a prodcution line (Score:4, Insightful)
So Edison probably owns the copyright...