When customers telephone Paragon Development Systems looking for help with a balky printer they aren’t patched through to a call center in India, Eastern Europe or the Philippines. Instead, they get a friendly voice from Madison, Wisconsin usually with a Midwestern twang.
….The city’s high-tech profile has also received two more boosts in the past six months with Google setting up an engineering office to focus on software systems design and Microsoft opening an advanced development lab in partnership with the UW-Madison’s computer science department.
Nobody is ready yet to throw around the term “Madison Masala,” but viewing the region as a potential IT outsourcing destination is not so far-fetched. The combination of recent graduates from Madison Area Technical College and the University of Wisconsin, coupled with a wage scale lower than the coasts, provides some distinct advantages.
(Dean of International Studies Gilles Bousquet is quoted in this story.)