Bangalore vs. Chennai - Offshore Outsourcing to India
The latest print edition of Dataquest has a special coverage of Chennai. While Bangalore and Hyderabad have been hogging all the limelight around offshore outsourcing and software services in the media, good ol’ Chennai has been slowly and steadily chugging towards a fairly enviable software services industry. We have always known it in running our Lotus Notes Outsourcing business, and it is good to see the trade media recognizing it. Some highlights from the article:
- Chennai (Tamil Nadu) is the third largest recipient of FDI into India
- The state has 25 universities, and 250 engineering colleges producing over 70,000 engineering graduates of whom 35,000 are from IT, CS and related backgrounds.
- Chennai has upto 50% lower attrition compared to other locations
- Real Estate prices in Chennai are 30 - 40% cheaper than Bangalore
- Chennai has 99.7% power availability, far more than what Bangalore has
- Chennai has excellent connectivity with bandwidth in excess of 13 Tbps+ being the nodal point for interconnect with Singapore and other East Asian countries
- Chennai has good international connections with seamless connection to South East Asia and Europe
The present government and its competent IT secretary, Vivek Harinarain have been slowly working towards selling the state as an investment destination. With wins like Yahoo and HP, and existing operations of CA, Verizon, World Bank, McKinsey and others, Chennai will be a big player in the years to come.