The average annual salary for an IT worker in the US is about $75,000, according to a late 2007 report by Alsbridge, an outsourcing consulting firm.
In India it's about $7,779 and in Argentina, it's slightly higher at $9,478.
In Brazil, the annual wage jumps to $13,163, and in Mexico it climbs to $17,899.
"The bottom line is that there aren't great alternatives with the scale, quality, price structure, and the lack of risk of India," says Stephanie Moore, vice-president at Forrester.
Spreading out work in several nations
Even Lopez acknowledges that Latin America can't approximate India's scale. Mexico, for instance, has about 500,000 IT workers and graduates an additional 65,000 each year.
Last year in India there were more than 1.6 million IT workers employed; an additional 495,000 graduate each year, according to NASSCOM, an IT trade group in India.
Image: English-speaking operators work through the night at the IDT Global multi-lingual call center in Jerusalem, Israel | Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images
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