Accenture Ltd. (NYSE: ACN), a global consulting firm that also offers outsourcing and technology services, reported earnings after the close today. Earnings per share for the quarter ending May 31 were $0.68 on $5.15 billion in revenue, compared to the $0.64 average and $0.67 high expected from analysts. The consensus revenue target was $5.2 billion, and results were hurt by currency translation effects, which reduced U.S. dollar results by 12%. Year-over-year, EPS was down 8% from the $0.74 earned in the same quarter last year, with the difference again attributable to currency exchange.

Shares, which were up fractionally today, jumped almost 5% in after-hours trading following the earnings results.

Markets were mixed and downish Tuesday, but there was some good news to be found.

Housing starts and building permits soared, causing a big pop in shares to battered homebuilders. Whether this is a false start or a real jump, its hard to get anything but good news out of a housing market so beaten down.

On the industrial side, the Produce Price Index remained relatively stable, walking the narrow path between two evils -- deflation and inflation.

This week the U.S. Postal Service hiked the rates on postage, covering a majority of the mail services like first-class mail, first-class international, postcards, and special services. So, the price for a one-ounce first-class stamp has gone from $0.42 to $0.44.

And, I'm sure we'll continue to see more increases.

Unfortunately, this is yet more bad news for small businesses, which are trying to deal with the recession.

Satyam Computer Services (NYSE: SAY) stock has not opened for U.S. trading in days -- and if it did it would be down 91%. As I posted, its CEO announced that Satyam's financial statements were fraudulent and that means that its clients and 53,000 employees are up for grabs. In a world of shrinking budgets, Satyam's competitors ought to be eagerly feeding on the flesh of this crippled company.

Which competitors are likely to pick up the slack? Both Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and and International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM) are best positioned to feed on Satyam's corpse. And with the $50 billion a year market for offshoring experienced a growth slowdown from 29% in 2008 to 10% in 2009 -- those Satyam clients could help plug the growth gap,

There are three reasons why Accenture and IBM should gain:

• They each already supply most of Satyam's blue-chip corporate clients;
• They each have built up their Indian operations in recent years, so they offer Satyam customers the same skills at competitive prices; and
• They are not Indian companies and therefore are not under the same corporate governance cloud that Satyam's revelations spread to all of India's outsourcers.

It may not be too late to invest in Accenture -- which is much more focused on consulting -- to take advantage of this possibility. In the case of IBM, the pickings from Satyam may not be big enough to move its stock.

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College. His eighth book is You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned.

With everything from call centers to web site design being outsourced, the clear trend in the business world is to outsource almost any task that can be done cheaper and quicker somewhere else. Reports that CBS (NYSE: CBS) and cable news pioneer CNN, owned by Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) are in talks about outsourcing the news, should come as no surprise.

According to a story in The New York Times, "Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS's news-gathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network's news feeds. "

With CBS stuck in third place among major networks for years, and general viewership of the evening news falling due to alternative news outlets such as cable news, blogs and internet sites, this tie-up would make economic sense. CBS would be able to keep its brand name and substantially cut costs, as they would be able to take CNN news feeds from around the country.

Christopher Johns is certainly well-traveled. For more than a decade, he has started ventures in places like Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines.

His latest company is SupportSave, an outsourcing services provider for small and mid-sized customers.

I recently had a chance to interview him:

Some background on your company?

The company got its start in November 2004. Our founders strongly believed that the trend of outsourcing should not only benefit Fortune 1000 companies. So they set out to create a business model that makes outsourcing affordable to businesses of any size.

We thought the Philippines as the most suitable destination for our services because of the strong language skills, minimal accent and affinity towards American culture.

Back in October 2004, PeopleSupport Inc. (NASDAQ: PSPT) went public at $7 per share (the offering was fairly lackluster as the stock price fell on its first day of trading).

Well, now the company may no longer be public. That is, on Friday, PeopleSupport announced that it got a $15 per share buyout offer from IPVG and AO Capital Partners.

PeopleSupport provides offshore business process outsourcing services -- such as for customer management and transcription. The company operates in the Philippines, Costa Rica, and the United States.

However, the stock price plunged 38% in March because of a weak quarterly report. No doubt, the company faces intense competition from players like IBM (NYSE: IBM), Convergys, and eTelecare. Thus, it's likely we'll see consolidation in the space.

Interestingly enough, BloggingStocks had a piece -- a day before the buyout announcement --t hat showed that PeopleSupport had a "bullish 'flag'" pattern on its stock chart.

Yes, it certainly did.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

You don't have to be a fashionista to know that French fashion has a reputation for being uppity and tres expensive. They don't call it haute couture for nothing.

But according to the Wall Street Journal, "With the euro reaching new records against the dollar, U.S. shoppers are finding European designer labels even more expensive than in past years. But a young crop of French designers is now trying to prove that style doesn't have to be so costly."

Unlike the traditional fashion houses selling $1,000 bags, less expensive French labels are outsourcing manufacturing to keep costs down -- a big no-no in traditional fashion circles, where local production is considered key to retaining cachet. Some are also taking the hit on the euro's rise, rather than passing the expense on to American consumers.

Paul & Joe is even -- gasp -- designing a collection for Target (NYSE: TGT).

Will Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) be able to capitalize on the trend toward more affordable French fashions, as it struggles with its efforts to sell more upscale clothing? Doubtful. If outsourcing production in France hurts cachet, designing clothes for Wal-Mart, the international symbol of corporate avarice and apathy toward people, would be fashion suicide.

Wipro (NYSE: WIP), one of the largest companies in India, announced this past week that it saw a profit rise of 17% to $204 million in its latest quarter, on the back of new outsourcing contracts and gains from a U.S.-based acquisition. Wipro is currently the India's third-largest outsourcing company, and handles accounting, customer service, human resources and other functions for many firms in the Fortune 500. If you've ever read about outsourcing domestic jobs to India, this is a top company in that field.

Sales in the July to September quarter rose to $1.2 billion as Wipro acquired almost 60 new contracts and saw an increase in sales based on its acquisition of New Jersey-based Infocrossing Inc., a networking infrastructure company. Wipro announced that a single contract alone with an unidentified U.S. company was worth $160 million alone. At the end of the quarter, Wipro employed over 77,000 people.

In addition to labor outsourcing, the company writes software for the likes of General Motors (NYSE: GM) and Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO). With such a stellar quarter, the company's CEO stated that new clients were being charged 3% to 5% above standard billing rates, and that it was billing existing clients at higher rates. I'm not sure that's the kind of thing you want to release publicly, but there you have it. Wipro, expect from phone calls soon, okay?

Sunday's New York Times reported that government officials in at least 12 states are exploring the possibility of leasing out their state lotteries to private operators. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has voiced his support for the idea, where he says his state has been told it could reap a windfall of as much as $37 billion.

Critics contend that a privately held lottery would market itself more aggressively -- further victimizing the low-income and minority consumers who already form a disproportionate share of the lottery's customer base. Others worry that the traditional beneficiaries of the lottery -- schools -- would be shortchanged in the long run because the one-time cash infusion would be used to fund other needs.

But there's something else to think about. The only reason that the California Lottery is worth as much as $37 billion is that it exists as a monopoly, exempted from competition because the very government that sponsors it would send anyone to jail if they tried to do the same thing on their own. After all, gambling is wrong!

What makes the lottery a good business is that the payout ratios (tickets sold minus prize money paid out) are very low because there's no competition. If the lottery weren't a monopoly, competition would work, payouts would soar, and the lottery wouldn't be such a great business -- nor would it victimize the poor the way that it currently does.

But of course, private operators want to buy the monopoly rights to the lottery. But from a rational perspective, I have a problem with this: If Goldman Sachs (or whoever ends up winning the auction) can run a lottery, why shouldn't someone else be allowed to? If there's something wrong with the idea of legalized gambling (which, apparently there is, because it's illegal), does using it to raise money for state bureaucracy somehow negate that? What's next? The Massachusetts State Whorehouse?

We shouldn't be talking about privatizing the lottery -- we should be talking about abolishing it.

If you're tired of poisoning your kids with lead-painted toys from China or killing your pets with melamine-laced Chinese pet food, you may be wondering what you can buy that's made in America.

To its credit, China is trying to fix its reputation. Last week, according to CBS News, China's product safety chief Li Changjiang offered assurances that toys made in China would be "safer, better and more appealing. Before Christmas, we will certainly provide children safer, better and more appealing toys. They will certainly like them." To bolster that claim, on September 11th, China signed an agreement to prohibit the use of lead paint on toys exported to the United States.

As I posted in July, I expect that there could be a business opportunity to sell products to U.S. consumers that are made anywhere but China. Then I cited examples of an upscale New York grocery with no Chinese seafood and a New Jersey-based natural producer of premium dog food blended from meat and vegetables. However, I have not seen much in the way of new developments in the last few months.

So what are the choices for those who want to buy products made in the U.S.A.?

Me. A mom. Presumably the sort of human being who'd be up in arms with outrage over this latest bit of recall news. Instead, I'm rolling my eyes and wondering what's really behind all this recall madness. Is it a slow news week? (not with all the fun we're having with world's credit market meltdown!). Terrorists out to kill our children via poisonous toys? Or is is just our hysteria over China eating our lunch. The lunch we happily sent over to them.

I think it's probably the latter. And that's not to say I have any doubt over whether China is turning out mountains of subpar crap for us. Standards are different over there, after all. And at the end of the day, everyone gets what they pay for, right, Mattel (NYSE: MAT)?

I'm just starting to find it suspect that every day brings new screaming headlines about more poisonous, sub-par products being sent to us from China. Toxic toothpaste! Poisoned pet food! Lead-coated toys! Now it's killer bibs!

The initial consensus on Wall Street regarding IBM's (NYSE: IBM) announcement Wednesday that it would eliminate another 1,570 positions is that the effort represents another prudent action in its "reorganizational tripod" of fewer positions, cheaper positions, and reinvented positions.

Further, the reorganization effort represents nothing less than wholesale transformation of the company as it confronts the multi-directional competitive winds of the globalization era. Job eliminations bring Big Blue more in line with today's continuously right-sizing, temperature-taking business environment. Wholesale shifts of jobs to lower-cost markets -- IBM's India workforce surged to 52,000 in 2006 from a scant 9,000 in 2003 -- helps IBM make up for lost time vis-a-vis lower-cost competitors. And, perhaps most significant, IBM's operational shifts -- including rethinking how it delivers services -- create a more nimble, higher-value company that can respond to clients' needs quicker and more productively. IBM's shares closed Wednesday up $1.03 to $106.93.

Further, more position "rebalancing" may be ahead: IBM, which with Wednesday's cuts has now eliminated 3,700 positions in 2007, still has about 356,000 employees, including an eye-opening 128,000 based in the United States. And as part of those cuts, many analysts in the quarters ahead see a continued trimming of global services in favor of software, where revenue is growing faster.

We've come a long way from the days of crackling, garbled drive-through terminals at our favorite fast fooderies. Now many are equipped with a digital screen, designed to verify orders and cut down on errors (why would I ever order a bean burrito with extra onions and no cheese?).

Wendy's International (NYSE: WEN) is forging ahead with the latest innovation as it outsources the job of drive-through order taking. The home of the Frosty and the square burgers has established a call center near Wilmington, Delaware. A staff of about 12 workers utilizes Internet phone lines to man food orders for nine restaurants in five states, including New Hampshire and Florida.

While I wonder about the reliability of the new technology (what if the phone lines go out?), the CEO of Exit 41, a Boston company specializing in remote-ordering systems, affirms that outsourcing the order-taking both reduces errors and lowers stress for on-site employees. And if every drive-through transaction is shortened by even fractions of a second, the savings can be in the millions.

Beth Gaston Moon is an analyst at Schaeffer's Investment Research.

My recent stories about American Idol inflamed reader passions from many perspectives. Sanjaya aside, the idea of American companies out-sourcing jobs to India or anywhere else offends many people. Some readers of American Idol: Are Indian call centers skewing the vote? thought I was singling out the people of India which they interpreted as hostile and racist. I thought I would set the record straight about my views on the subject.

1. The jobs we are sending overseas to India, or elsewhere, is not affecting the employment rate in the United States to any appreciable level. Last I read the unemployment rate stood at 4.5%. It has been hovering between 4% and 5% for several years. To me that is actually close to full employment in a market society as complex as ours. I have no expectation that we could sustain anything lower.
2. Our connection and developing relationship with India in particular is extremely valuable. I believe India has as much potential as any nation, and more than most, to help us expand our economy. It's size, value system, geographic location, history, English foundation, and more make it a great partner. There is much more to gain than to lose for both sides.
3. The fluidity of markets and the greatest transparency in business dealings should be our focus and the word globalization is sometimes a distraction. It is not specific and means different things to different people. Integration is a better word. International partnering is a better term. Since the market is becoming more and more fluid we have not only witnessed call-centers and software development moving overseas, but in some cases they are coming back as companies experiment and decide they function better with local talent and control.

One of the greatest ironies I find in this whole discussion is that the people that complain about the outsourcing of work to other countries are the same ones that complain if a foreign company comes to set up shop in the United States - bringing jobs here!