The US-India corridor for services outsourcing, now over three decades old, has moved from providing software programming to a wide range of lines of work, encompassing business processes, call-centers and analytical work, and going beyond its original focus on the banking industry to cover other financial services, healthcare and personnel management. The talk will address the benefits and risks associated with outsourcing,  the value proposition from a vendors' perspective and trends in the outsourcing services industry. The talk will take an analytical view of the drivers of outsourcing, going beyond the usual arguments based on cost arbitrage to show how firms like TCS have built defensible businesses based on process maturity, domain expertise, scale and scope. 

Surya Kant (known as Sury) is  President, Tata Consultancy Services  North America. Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS) is India's largest global IT consulting and services company, employing over 50,000 persons in 34 countries. His 27 year career with TCS includes setting up TCS Japan in 1987. He has also been country manager, TCS UK.  His focus areas include software quality assurance and delivery center management.

Sury received his Masters in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi (1978) and his Bachelors of Electrical Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering (1976). He is a member of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), USA. He was nominated to the Tata Group Top Strategic Leadership Programme in 2004.

Tea and samosas will be served.

After more than 30 years under the strong leadership of Suharto, Indonesians saw three weak and not always legitimate presidents come and go: B. J. Habibie (1998-99), Abdurrahman Wahid (1999-2001), and Megawati Sukarnoputri (2001-2004). Democratization went forward. Yet Indonesians increasingly longed for a stronger

government that could deliver on its promises, including economic development. In 2004 Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) won the country's first-ever direct presidential election by a landslide. During the campaign he promised, above all, an effective

government. Looking back on his first year, how has he performed? Has he broken the string of weak leaders? Will he grow in his job to become more effective? More

broadly, are weak leaders good for democracy but bad for development? Or does Indonesia illustrate some other relationship between national leadership, political

openness, and economic progress?

Hadi Soesastro is currently a visiting professor in the Weatherhead Institute of East Asian Studies at Columbia University. He has been with CSIS since 1971. His research interests include the political economy of development, regionalism, and trade, and energy issues, topics on which he has published and lectured widely. Recent writing on Indonesia includes an essay in Economic Recovery and Reform (2004). Dr. Soesastro chairs the International Steering Committee of PAFTAD (Pacific Trade and Development) and serves as an adjunct professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. In Indonesia he has served as a member of the National Research Council and the National Economic Council. He earned his PhD from the RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, California.

In today's global economy, access to resources around the world has never been easier. The high tech industry has always been in the forefront of globalization in lowering costs, acquiring talent as well as serving markets. For instance, Asian countries have long been known for their vast manufacturing bases for western high tech industry.

In recent years, thanks to Y2K, India has become the leader in software outsourcing. China, given its expanding economy as well as its open market direction, has rapidly become the emerging location for multi-national semiconductor companies to outsource their product development amidst China's own burgeoning integrated circuit (IC) industry. Mr. Lee has first-hand experience in building and managing an IC product development center in Shanghai, China. He will discuss the challenges of operating a R&D organization in an environment of different languages and cultures. He will also share his vision of the future of the IC industry in China.

Mr. Lee is Group Vice President and general manager of Timing Solutions Products at Integrated Device Technology, Inc.(IDT), a public semiconductor company of $650 million annual sales, focusing on valued-added solutions for communication, consumer and computing markets. He has been with IDT for the last 22 years and has served various management roles. In 2001, he architected the acquisition of Newave Semiconductor Corporation in China and established the Shanghai Product Development Center for IDT. Before joining IDT in 1984, Mr. Lee spent 5 years at Intel Corporation as a technologist for the early development of flash memory technology. Mr. Lee earned his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 1975 and M.S. degree from Case Western Reserve University in 1979.

The Philippines suffers from an ominous systemic deficit: the incapacity of democratic institutions to respond to pent-up social demands. A scant four years after a second "peoople power revolution" in 2001 brought down President Joseph Estrada on charges of involvement in illegal gambling, the country again finds itself in crisis. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo struggles to retain power as she faces allegations that close relatives are also involved in gambling syndicates and still more damaging accusations of complicity in fixing the May 2004 elections. Unlike in 1986 and 2001, when changes in leadership nurtured new hopes, the crisis of 2005 reveals a system desperately struggling for legitimacy. Prof. Hutchcroft will argue for well-considered institutional reform designed to break the cycle of recurrent crisis and tackle the country's perilous democratic deficit.

Paul D. Hutchcroft has written widely on Philippine politics and political economy, including Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines (1998). His current writing includes a book on state formation and territorial politics in the Philippines from the early American colonial period through the enactment of the Local Government Code in the 1990s; and an edited volume on Philippine political reform stemming from a workshop he organized in Manila in July. He has been a visiting fellow at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore and is now the associate chair of UW-Madison's Political Science Department.

Susan Chira will speak about rising China, and compare it to her 20-year-old experience as a journalist reporting on risen Japan and rising Korea. Even as Iraq grabs the headlines, the story of Rising China is one of the most gripping, the most resonant of our times. It presents enormous and obvious policy challenges, and considerable journalistic challenges, too. What is familiar in China's rise, and what is unique? How do you cover and present to readers a country that is at once exuberant and fearful, increasingly prosperous and increasingly unequal, newly open and reflexively repressive? The New York Times has had a personal brush with these many faces of China: its researcher, Zhao Yan, is still mired in jail after a year, charged with violating its vaguely-written, draconian law on state secrets.

Susan Chira was named foreign editor for The New York Times in January 2004. Previously, Ms. Chira had been editorial director of book development since September 2002. Before that she was the editor of the Week in Review section at The Times since October 1999, after having served as deputy foreign editor of the newspaper since February 1997. Prior to that, she served in a variety of reporting positions including national education correspondent, correspondent for the newspaper in Tokyo from October 1984 until February 1989, metropolitan reporter in the Albany and Stamford bureaus, and reporter for the Business Day section.

Ms. Chira joined The Times as a trainee on the metropolitan desk in 1981 and was promoted to reporter in July 1982.

She received a B.A. degree in history and East Asian studies from Harvard University in 1980, graduating summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. As an undergraduate, she was a reporter and later president of The Harvard Crimson. She studied Japanese for a year and a half at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo and at Middlebury College, Vt.

Susan Chira is married to Michael Shapiro, a writer and assistant professor of journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. They have a daughter and a son.

For years policymakers in China have advocated creating "Silicon Valleys" in China, but only recently has China's semiconductor industry taken off. Rather than the state leading the way, economic globalization has created the large flow of capital and knowledge to the developing world that has spurred China's technological development in recent years.

However, not all firms in China benefit equally from these inflows of financial and human capital. Presenting both industry-wide data and case studies of individual firms, Dr. Fuller will explain how the politics of finance in China shape which Chinese chip firms become fast learners able to compete in world markets and which ones remain technological laggards.

Douglas Fuller has spent over ten years researching technological development in East Asia. Most recently, he completed a doctorate at MIT in political economy. The topic of his thesis was technological development in China's IT industry. For this and previous research, he has interviewed IT firms in Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the People's Republic of China and the US. He has published articles in Industry and Innovation and other peer-reviewed journals.

Part of SPRIE's Greater China and the Globalization of R&D seminar series.

Realpolitik pessimists, power transition theorists, and others see China's rise as inherently destabilizing. However, China has already been growing rapidly for almost three decades, and there is little evidence that the region is devolving into balancing, nor that China's rise is causing undue alarm in the region. China's expected emergence as the most powerful state in East Asia has been accompanied with more stability than pessimists believed because hierarchy, not balancing, is emerging in East Asia. Dr. Kang explains the relationships between dominant and secondary states in a hierarchic system. Furthermore, on the one hand, China has provided credible information about its capabilities and intentions to its neighbors. On the other hand, East Asian states actually believe China's claims, and hence do not fear -- and instead seek to benefit from - China's rise. This shared understanding about China's preferences and limited aims short-circuits the security dilemma.

David Kang has scholarly interests in both business-government relations and international relations, with a focus on Asia. His book Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines (Cambridge University Press, 2002), was named by Choice as a 2003 Outstanding Academic Title. He is also author of Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies, co-authored with Victor Cha (Columbia University Press, 2003). Kang is a Stanford alumnus (B.A. 1988, anthropology and international relations) and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley.