outsourcing

Google's Motorola Mobility unit has signed a deal to sell its Chinese manufacturing operations to Flextronics, which has agreed to run its Brazil facility as well.

Under the deal, announced yesterday, employees and assets will transfer to Flextronics once the deal closes, expected in the first half of 2013. The deal also calls for a manufacturing and services agreement for Android and other mobile devices between the two companies. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

The deal allows Motorola to run more efficiently under Google, which has continued to absorb the unit's losses since taking over the business earlier … Read more

Various industry watchers are weighing in on Apple CEO Tim Cook's remark this week that the company will invest $100 million into making Macs in the U.S., with some saying the move will create 200 new jobs.

In an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, Cook was asked what it would take to get Apple back to building products in the states. Cook said, in part: "Next year we are going to bring some production to the U.S. on the Mac. We've been working on this for a long time, and we were getting closer to … Read more

A couple of decades ago, women graduating from one of the thousands of colleges in India had limited options. If they went with the more popular career choices of the time, they could teach in a school, work at a bank or for the government. These days, they have another professional avenue - the IT services industry.

According to official data, India's IT and BPO services industry employs some three million workers. Today about a quarter or more of these are women, says India's industry trade body Nasscom. That is up from a fifth of the workforce in … Read more

TaskRabbit, the San Francisco-based startup that lets people outsource errands, announced today it has raised $17.8 million in Series B financing.

The new round was led by LightSpeed Venture Partners and included contributions from TaskRabbit's existing partners, as well as new investors Allen & Company and The Tornante Company, an investment firm led by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner.

The new round of financing comes seven months after TaskRabbit raised $5 million in Series A financing, bringing its total financing to date at $22.8 million. Since that round in May, the company says it has seen its … Read more

Microsoft has outsourced its internal IT services--help desk, desk-side services, infrastructure and application support--to Indian outsourcing firm Infosys.

For Infosys, managing Microsoft's internal IT gives it a high-profile customer and insight to using the latest technologies from the software giant. Infosys will manage IT services for Microsoft employees worldwide. Microsoft has noted that Infosys is benefiting from a consolidation of services that were already outsourced to HP and others.

Specifically, Infosys is tasked with streamlining processes, simplifying support and service, and cutting costs by using Microsoft's own software, say Windows 7. Infosys will support Microsoft's applications, devices, … Read more

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Sprint Nextel will outsource its network to Ericsson in a seven-year deal valued at $4.5 billion to $5 billion.

The deal, announced Thursday, allows Sprint to offload the costs associated with running its network. Sprint will transfer 6,000 employees to Ericsson.

Ericsson will now handle all the day-to-day operations and maintenance. The transfer of the network and the employees that go with them is set to happen by the end of the third quarter.

Steve Elfman, Sprint's president of network operations and wholesale, said on a conference … Read more

AMMAN, Jordan--Even by the extremes of the Middle East, Jordan is an unusual place.

Unlike its neighbors to the south and east, it enjoys no vast oil wealth. It shares the region's longest border with Israel, about 150 miles, and signed a peace treaty with its neighbor in 1994. Although the northern third of the country benefits from a Mediterranean climate, the rest is largely desert.

That leaves outsourcing and other businesses as one obvious bright spot, and Jordan is hoping to enlist computer technology and the Internet to fight an unemployment rate that probably hovers around 30 percent, … Read more

In an effort to cut costs, Sprint Nextel may outsource management of its cellular network to equipment vendor Ericsson and transfer 5,000 to 7,000 U.S. employees to that company as part of the deal.

That's according to The Wall Street Journal, which quotes sources familiar with the matter as saying the beleaguered cell phone operator could end up paying Ericsson as much as $2 billion over several years to maintain the thousands of cell sites that carry Sprint's wireless voice and data traffic. The WSJ quotes those sources as saying the deal could slash Sprint'… Read more

Forget Chennai and Mumbai. The outsourcing hubs of tomorrow will be in Guadalajara and Gdansk.

An eclectic mix of 31 cities worldwide will challenge today's best-known outsourcing centers in China and India, according to a new report from professional services giant KPMG.

Faced with overburdened telecommunications infrastructure and overstretched labor markets in traditional offshore locations, these cities are among the alternatives that should be considered by companies, the report says.

The report found that the new cities in the Asia-Pacific region offer lower costs, younger populations, and government incentives such as easy work permits, while those in Europe, Middle … Read more