This indicates another area of growth for the offshore industry as their previous primary focus has been application development while management of those systems was being handled by American IT workers. .
While United States manufacturers have used offshore outsourcing for many decades to lower costs, American service industries have only recently begun reaping the financial benefits of going overseas. Many other companies have now opened overseas development facilities in India, Spain and the Czech Republic. MasterCard International Inc. launched in June of 2001, a joint venture with the Indian company Mascon Global Ltd. Together they formed Mascon-MasterCard Global Technology Services, Ltd which now developed and now maintains MasterCard's core processing functions. MasterCard International Inc. has reduced related processing costs by twenty percent. .
The strategy of Delphi, global manufacturer of auto-engine parts, has been to globally source its IT work through third-party vendors and even through its own IT department. Delphi regional heads came together to discuss the development and maintenance of expense-reporting software. The discussions centered on cost-effectiveness and the soundness of the technologies available. In the end, Delphi's operation in Mexico was selected to complete the project. Now Delphi's expense reporting for American, European and Mexican plants will be handled by the Mexico finance staff. For American IT workers, this is another example of the loss of American IT jobs to offshore sources. .
Software programming had been a huge employment opportunity for more than half a million Americans during the last decade. Now over seven percent of the programmers are unemployed. The field is shrinking as more companies take their software development work to the global marketplace. From 2000 to 2002, over 87,000 programmers walked away from the programming field.
