Leaders of industry and academia will gather in Silicon Valley on Friday, May 30, to discuss the implications of the growing global movement of information technology.
| Reporters are invited to attend |
When: Friday, May 30, 2003, 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.
Where: UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Regional Center, Moffett Field
Who: A full workshop schedule is available online at http://sccie.ucsc.edu/events/GlobalIT/.
Among the participants are AnnaLee Saxenian, author of Silicon Valley's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 and a UC Berkeley professor in the School of Information Management and Systems and the Department of City and Regional Planning; Alok Aggarwal, former director of IBM's India Research Laboratory and cofounder and chairman of Evalueserve; and Rafiq Dossani, a consulting professor at Stanford University's Asia/Pacific Research Center.
Background: Silicon Valley is already strongly tied to China and India through entrepreneurs, investment, and technology. The coming decades will see these ties deepen, with China and India becoming even more central players and markets for California and each other. For Silicon Valley, the central question is whether China and India will be competitors, partners, or merely markets in the global IT industry.
Technology itself is partly a driver of the changing relationship. As telecommunications technology has reached around the globe, China and India have emerged as key providers of IT services. "We never thought it would make sense to move services overseas because we require contact to provide service, but all that has changed as it costs the same to call Idaho as to call India, where services can be provided at one-third to one-quarter the cost," said Nirvikar Singh, professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and co-director of the UCSC Center for International Economics (SCCIE), which is cosponsoring the workshop.
Technology provides the opportunity, but how Silicon Valley, Chinese, and Indian companies manage these new relationships -- and issues of security, reliability, and national interest -- remains an open question. Already the manufacturing "workshop of the world," China is developing new ties with India as companies in both nations become global forces in their own right. "The effect may be not only cheaper servicing of the U.S. market but also more effective servicing of the Asian market," Singh said.
Silicon Valley remains an unparalleled center of IT innovation, management, and partnership for both nations. But the nature of the global IT industry is dynamic -- with technologies, markets, and human networks in constant evolution -- and requires new perspectives and insights on the future.
The workshop is being sponsored by SCCIE; the UCSC Center for Global, International and Regional Studies; Kamil and Talat Hasan; the UC Santa Cruz Office of Research; and the UCSC South Asian Studies Initiative. For further information please contact SCCIE at sccie@ucsc.edu.
