One out of 10 jobs in the U.S. computer services and software industry could shift to lower-cost emerging markets such as India or Russia by the end of 2004, a top computer consultancy said on Tuesday.



Gartner Inc., the world’s biggest high-tech forecasting firm, said in a report entitled “U.S. Offshore Outsourcing: Structural Changes, Big Impact” that 500,000 of the 10.3 million U.S. technology jobs could move just in 2003 and 2004.



While professionals in the computer industry itself are likely to bear the brunt, the report predicts that one in 20 tech jobs in industry-at-large also could be moved overseas.

This is especially true in industries with high concentrations of knowledge workers such as banking, health care and insurance, the author of the survey said.



“Suddenly we have a profession — computer programming — that has to wake up and consider what value it really has to offer,” Diane Morello, a Gartner vice president and research director who studies work force issues said in an interview.



“Offshore outsourcing” is the euphemism the computer industry uses to describe the transformation of software development, computer services and customer call-center work.



As a global economic recession has hit hard over the past two years, U.S. companies have embraced as never before a decades-old trend to hire educated workers overseas who can be employed for a fraction of the cost of U.S.-based programmers.



Just last week, software maker Siebel Systems Inc. SEBL.O of San Mateo, California said it would cut 9 percent of its work force, or 490 jobs, and planned to move some operations overseas.



Executives of the world’s largest computer and services company, International Business Machines Corp. were quoted recently as saying they had no competitive choice other than to expand software and semiconductor development overseas. The comments came to light in a recording supplied by a union seeking to organize IBM workers and supplied to Reuters. IBM now employs 5,400 workers in India out of a total work force of 316,000.

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