One route around the offshore obstacles is nearshoring to developed or nearby developing countries.

John Boyd sees growing interest by in-house call centers in nearshore locations. He cites Canada, Northern Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and Spain for the US Spanish-speaking market.

Wait — isn't writing software for foreign companies India's specialty? By the numbers, yes. The outsourcing business there totaled an estimated $ 12 billion in 2003 out of $ 25 billion from low-cost locales worldwide. But Bulgaria, Romania, and other locations on the outskirts of Europe are plying a new twist on the craze for sending technology development offshore. They're pushing what pundits call ''near-shoring,'' or shifting work to countries that cost less but are only a short hop away. Finnish companies farm out IT work to Estonia, Germans use contractors in Poland, and Italians ship projects to Serbia. For a lot of European companies, ''India seems an awfully long way away,'' says information technology services analyst Ian Marriott of researcher Gartner Inc.

"We want to help the companies by managing their entire IT spend with sourcing strategies. We would like to be part of big companies and help them manage sourcing, decide portfolio of whether to go for outsourcing or nearshoring or onshoring, apart from negotiating on their behalf with providers," he said.