If you pick up a phone in CollabNet's office in Chennai and dial a Brisbane, Calif., extension, you can reach the West Coast via VoIP Internet telephony, no long-distance call required. It's a hotline from one economic reality to another.

In Chennai, day laborers do road construction on the clogged city streets by hand without benefit of bulldozers or cranes, working with pickaxes and shovels at the rate of $4 U.S. a day. The traffic veering around their stooped, sweaty forms is a writhing choke of belching open-air auto-rickshaws, cars, motorcycles and scooters. Barefoot bicyclists brave the squalls, often with red, blue, yellow and green jugs strapped to the back of their bikes: water.

There's such a severe shortage of water here that while the wealthy buy theirs commercially and have it delivered to their homes in trucks by the tankful, their servants -- the legions of drivers and cooks and maids and guards -- wait in line for more than an hour each day to receive their own subsidized rations.

Walking the ragged sidewalks here means dodging not only the other pedestrians and stray dogs, but one-man-band businesses that have annexed scraps of pavement: a tailor sits behind an ancient sewing machine in the middle of the pavement, open for business.

And yet, on the same streets where child beggars wade into traffic, putting their cupped filthy hands to their mouths to plead for food, billboards advertising "Business Process Outsourcing" broadcast an entirely different set of possibilities. Glimpses of it are visible in the dilapidated local airport, where it is 80 degrees Fahrenheit at night with no air conditioning (except for ceiling fans -- which are all turned off), but there's a room of smudged, gray PCs where travelers can check their e-mail. And you can hear it at a charity benefit, where the famed Odissi dancer Sonal Mansingh teases the posh audience with a "Message from Krishna!" jab when their mobile phones persist in interrupting her performance.

Past the street vendor selling vegetables from a wooden cart, and the men in flowing kurtas, an elevator takes you up to CollabNet's offices on the third floor of Trimex Towers on Subbaraya Avenue. Past the guard at the front door, what's shocking is not how different the office here is from the corporate headquarters back in Brisbane overlooking the San Francisco Bay, but how fundamentally similar it is. You're greeted with a setup that could be any start-up in Mountain View or Sunnyvale: rows of cubicles filled with guys in their 20s -- and a few women -- dutifully engrossed in their computer monitors.

There's a sport to picking out the superficial differences between CollabNet's two offices: In Chennai, the bathroom doors are marked "ladies," "gents" and "executive." In Brisbane, the receptionist wears a trendy pink Paul Frank T-shirt with a signature monkey cartoon on the front over jeans with a rainbow-colored stripe up the side. In Chennai, the receptionist sports an elegant salwar kameez with a flowing dupatta scarf draped down the back -- casual wear by local standards.

In Brisbane, the lunchroom is stocked with a Galaga arcade game, a foosball table, a serve-yourself fridge full of soft drinks and a pantry bursting with granola bars. In Chennai, a servant delivers sweet south Indian coffee and cookies, and workers take coffee and tea breaks both morning and afternoon.

But the deeper into the work environment you get, the more the two offices appear identical at the most critical level: the technology. On their desktops, the developers and Q.A. (quality assurance) engineers here use the same tools as do the coders in Brisbane. Call it virtual, if you must, but in a very real sense, they are working in the same environment.

The real CollabNet workplace is not in Brisbane or Chennai, it's in the packets of information zipping across the Net, whether via instant messaging software or e-mail or through the features of the SourceCast collaboration software. All that really matters is who is online at any given time. In this Web-based development environment, notification is by e-mail, the browser is the interface and deploying means giving someone else a URL.

There are advantages to such virtuality, says Behlendorf. "Instead of having a conversation in person, you have the development over e-mail. If you have a conversation in person, you're lucky if someone takes notes. On an e-mail forum that stuff is always recorded. It's always available for searching."

Add a lot of cheap bandwidth to the mix and anything is possible. "During the [dot-com] boom a lot of telcos were laying a lot of cable across international lines. The cost of getting a T1 or a T3 to the other side of the world is no longer prohibitive for most companies," says Behlendorf. "There's actually a glut."

Now, someone is always working at CollabNet. "Any time of the day or night, 24/7, 365 days a year, people are on our IRC [chat] channels," brags Chris Clarke, 34, a director of engineering, who works out of Brisbane.

CollabNet is unusual in the outsourcing/offshoring debate in that the product it is selling is explicitly aimed at aiding the work of collaborating programmers. But the merging of offices across time zones and international borders is, on a global scale, a consequence of the advances in computer and telecommunications technology. Outsourcing, viewed from the technological perspective, is not surprising, nor is it necessarily exploitative. It's just what happens when you connect the world together.

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