Hi Tracy

>I think your perception is spot-on.

Thank you.

>However, there are drawbacks to outsourcing also which typically do not rear their ugly heads until further down the road. Good foresight can see it, but for some reason companies don't focus on the additional costs down the road but only the immediate up-front savings.

Yup.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/06/22/HNfivereasons_1.html?source=NLC-TB2005-06-22
< quote from this article >
An application maintenance worker in India, for example, earns about $25 per hour, compared to $87 per hour in the U.S, according to Gartner
< / quote from this article >

Makes it very attractive. In fact I feel that once the contract is gained the o/s guys do find out that the work involved is much higher than they estimated, this estimate overrun may not be due to malafied intentions but purly comminucations differences. This may lead to a let down feeling or a feeling of taking up more than one can chew. Hey, you know your business inside out and there will be a lot of things that are for granted to you, for me as an o/s guys it is just the specs I have quoted for and not the granted things which come up as surprises for me, thus as you mentioned a lot of things overrun.

All in all with overruns I guess the deal, as per figures above should not be worse off than $60 a savings of $27 and hour.