I noticed an interesting advertisement in my e-mail inbox the other day, coming via the Jerusalem Post. The advertiser was the Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute, in cooperation with the Israeli government.

“Come and support the Israeli business arena”, it was titled. Israel is gaining a reputation as a center for world-class professional services, it claimed, and it wanted me to consider outsourcing to Israel. It offered this information:

10 Reasons to Outsource to Israel

1. A critical mass of fluent English speakers. Multilingual capabilities include Arabic, Russian, French and German.

I just had to use that heading. It was taken from inside the current eWeek, which is featuring news and analysis on offshoring to Russia. We hear so much about sending our technology work to India and we perhaps never really take a good look at Russia.

When looking to offshore, especially technology, it really comes down to India and Russia. India’s technology industry dwarfs Russia’s, with $24 billion for the former and a mere $1 billion for the latter. The economics are similar, but aside from the size of their industries, what really sets them apart? For one, India has a vast English speaking workforce and they are relatively well versed in Western business. And the sheer number of skilled people makes it easy to have a flexible and changing staff on a project.

Jagdish Bhagwati is the author of In Defense of Globalization, a book that, as its title suggests, takes on globalization’s critics and aims to show that globalization is in fact the most powerful force for social good in the world today. He’s surely qualified, as Columbia University’s Professor of Economics, Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council of Foreign Relations, and a former Special Adviser to the United Nations on Globalization.

I only recently purchased the book and will share more as I read it, but I’ve been meaning to share a bit from a recent CIO Insight (March) interview with the author.

The May issue of CIO Insight had some interesting information related to team collaboration tools.

When asked where their companies stood with regard to web and collaboration applications, team collaboration tools where on all but 9% of respondents radars — with 47% having already deployed and 45% testing or evaluating a solution.

From the magazine:

What’s driving new-technology adoption? Improving business processes and making better use of information.

…

[The] strong interest in team collaboration tools suggests these applications lie at the sweet spot where these two business goals converge.