Research firm Datamonitor published a report recently that looked at the question of offshoring technical infrastructure. Most of the 150 CIOs and senior IT managers that were questioned said they would rather offshore their infrastructure to Eastern Europe than India. They also indicated a preference for an established Western supplier, rather than an overseas supplier.

This was positioned in much of the media as an anti-India story, or a pro-Eastern Europe story, or just a plain old anti-offshoring story, but isn’t this really like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. Think about it for a moment. Infrastructure has always been important, but in an era that is becoming dominated by virtualisation, services-oriented architecture, Web 2.0, software as a service, and any other acronym that basically means you need immense business flexibility, infrastructure is now absolutely critical.

The key drivers for a successful IT infrastructure site will be all around the quality of the facilities, reliability of the power and cooling systems, telecoms connectivity and so on, and none of these things are linked to labour arbitrage at all so I find it a bit odd that we keep on reading about offshoring and infrastructure in the same sentence. Should we expect the huge server farms in California to be going offshore anytime soon? I don’t think so.