Lastminute.com: Forget Google - we're the innovators

Would you consider doing something like Google does in the US with its Code-Jam programming contest?
Yeah, I look at that, it's pretty neat. They use a company called TopCoder -- who I worked with at Disney -- which is really neat.

There were some recent reports in the press about you outsourcing some of your tech operation to Argentina. What was the thinking behind that?
It's probably best to talk about what we aren't outsourcing to begin with. We are really the only big development shop in Europe at the moment. Consequently what we are not outsourcing is our crown jewels or high-tech things that are really giving us a high-tech advantage. In fact we will invest more in that and that's why we will do some serious University recruiting this year. That is why we have hired lots of people from the top schools this year and they are working on things like our search engines, our shopping basket, the JBoss infrastructure. There is like 130 guys there permanently and we will increase that staff of guys by 15 percent.

But we also want to be as competitive as we can when it come to investing in those key areas. So what we did was look at our technical operations function -- that includes Unix administration, database administration, things like that. And I think accidentally there were some teams of people that built very large open-source ecommerce projects for the Argentinean government. The economy there has changed tremendously and interestingly there are a large number of Argentine people with dual passports. That is a tremendous advantage as you don't have to go through all the problems you have in India.

We brought 20 guys here and they worked here side-by-side and then we took those functions and now we have those running in Argentina. I don't know anyone else who is a big e-commerce site who has off-shored their core infrastructure. I don't know that Amazon or Google has done it and I think they would be scared to death. So it was very high-risk. What is especially cool is that because there is a time-zone change we will have much better 24X7 support of the site as they start three-hours later. Without having to abuse people, we have improved our service -- do you want [to] go hire guys in the UK and tell them to work through the night?

This is different to outsourcing the way other people have done it, which is 'I have got a bunch of shitty processes I don't care about so I'll just dump those and try and do it for half the price'. We took a high-tech approach and changed the processes and outsourced an area that most probably don't do yet but it will be a trend, though.

So is Buenos Aires going to be the next Bangalore?
I think there is some opportunity. I have heard good reports from our vendors like IBM and Sun who have expanded their operations there. So I think there will be others to follow but we are leading the edge for sure. I am pretty proud it works.