Harley-Davidson outsources datacenter to Indian company.

Infosys, a datacenter operator and service provider based in India, is the recipient of an IT outsourcing deal with American icon Harley-Davidson, which will result in the loss of125 jobs, including 83 jobs at Harley’s Wisconsin headquarters. To some this will make it yet another story of American jobs lost to offshore outsourcing.  But like many things that seem obvious, the issue isn’t that simple.

Though an Indian company, Infosys is committed to the US market and has a large presence in the US. They have 16 existing US facilities and, in 2012, hired over 1200 people to staff those facilities here (and have stated that they expect to expand to 2000 by the end of the year). The contract with Harley requires that they open a facility in Milwaukee, which will increase the size of Infosys’ US presence and will open up 125 jobs, equal to the number of jobs being lost at Harley-Davidson.  And before you jump to the conclusion that the Harley IT employees are being left in the cold, there are some additional points that you need to consider.

The first is that of the 125 jobs being created, Infosys says that 70 will be directly on the Harley project. Harley will be encouraging employees whose jobs have been outsourced to apply for these jobs, and will keep their base pay and years of service credit that they acquired while working at Harley-Davidson.

Second, Harley will be creating 68 new internal jobs it refers to as “information technology management positions” which will be open to employees who are affected by the outsourcing.

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