Wipro BPO arm to outsource 20% jobs over 5 years

Wipro Ltd’s business process outsourcing (BPO) arm is planning to shift 20% of its workforce overseas in the next five years. It currently employs 24,000 people, out of which 2,500 are placed in the company's 15 overseas delivery centres.

Wipro BPO senior vice-president Ashutosh Vaidya told FE that language and local market expertise are driving this trend. “Around two years ago, 98% of our workforce was placed in India; the matrix has changed to 90:10 now. Going forward, we expect our international centres to grow at a faster rate,” he said. The company has centres in the Philippines, Eastern Europe and Australia among others and plans to tap newer geographies like Japan. “Delivery centres in international destinations like Philippines not only have the language advantage, they also have a better understanding of the local market nuances,” he said. Several Indian IT companies like Genpact have huge delivery centres in countries like Manila, the Philippines and Chile due to these advantages. The attractiveness of these new low-cost destinations has sparked off an entire debate on whether India is losing its competitive edge to these nations. Vaidya said India will continue to be the company's biggest centre. He refused to give details of how many people will be employed by its international centres. "We are increasingly moving towards a non-linear growth model, where growth in revenues is proportional to growth in employees, so the number is hard to predict," he said.

The company has opened 15 international centres in the last 18 months. "Though the process of starting operations in new countries depends on customer acquisitions, we expect to keep up the pace," he said. Vaidya added the company is also open to acquisitions to fill the gaps in countries like Japan or to gain domain expertise in areas such as healthcare or even strengthen its financial services practice.

Talking about the current demand situation, he said that the growth will be driven by the banking, financial services and insurance verticals while healthcare, manufacturing, retail and telecom are also looking up. "Continental Europe, Australia and Canada are new areas, which offer a lot of opportunities," he said.

Article Source: http://www.financialexpress.com

RP’S BPO revenue grows 19% in 2009

DESPITE the global financial crisis which crippled developed markets last year, revenues of the Philippine business-process outsourcing (BPO) industry grew by 19 percent to $7.22 billion.

A presentation made by the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (Bpap) showed the game-development subsector posted the highest increase in revenues at 50 percent.

“It’s been a good year, especially in the second half of 2009, when the recovery started to kick in,” said Gillian Virata, BPAP executive director for information and research, in a press conference in Pasay City on Monday.

The contact center of voice BPO remains as the single-biggest source of revenues. The subsector posted $5 billion, 22 percent higher than what it earned in 2008.

The back-office or knowledge-process outsourcing (KPO) subsector earned $1.19 billion, representing a 35-percent increase over its 2008 revenues.

Revenues of the IT sourcing subsector declined by 5.5 percent to $568 million; while revenue growth for engineering services outsourcing and transcription was flat in 2009.

The transcription subsector posted revenues of $186.8 million, 3 percent higher over the 2008 figure.

BPAP noted that over 70,000 new jobs in the BPO sector were created last year. The total number of employees in the IT-BPO sector was pegged at 442,164 or 19 percent higher over the 2008 level.

It noted that transcription, animation and ESO are expected to capture new markets in 2010.

Citing the Everest Research Institute, BPAP noted that the Philippines represents 15 percent of the global offshore BPO market. The Philippines, which offshore market has grown 46 percent annually since 2004, is poised to emerge as a leading destination for nonvoice BPO work.

Monchito Ibrahim, commissioner of the Commission on Information and Communications Technology, said the government is exerting all efforts to sustain the growth of the BPO industry.

“[The sector] can expect more support from the government especially in developing new markets,” said Ibrahim.

He cited the importance of the creation of the Department of Information and Communications Technology and the passage of a data privacy law in ensuring that the BPO sector in the Philippines will remain robust.

“We definitely need a privacy law to make us on a par with other countries in the world,” said Ibrahim.

Article Source: http://businessmirror.com.ph

Infosys bets on training to groom leaders

India’s second largest technology firm, Infosys, is putting a new premium on internal training as it looks to groom employees for leadership roles in its various ventures.

The company plans to increase its training budget by 24% next fiscal to $230 million, and has already hiked training time by 10 weeks to 29 weeks.

HR head and director TV Mohandas Pai said Infosys plans to reward employees by offering more leadership positions. This fiscal the company filled over a dozen leadership slots through its internal, ‘open market place for leadership’ initiative.

Most recently, the senior VP of its BPO arm, Swaminathan Dandapani, was elevated as CEO of Infosys BPO. By increasing training time, Infosys Technologies, which provides technology services to global customers like British Petroleum, DHL, JP Morgan, Citigroup, Royal Philips Electronics and Goldman Sachs, is preparing employees to handle the large transformational contracts.

For instance, for its retail customers Infosys offers system integration services, technology support, customer help desk, supply chain management and is also developing new e-commerce platforms for at least six of the top eight US retailers. For a global communications major, it’s developing 4G wireless solutions.

“We want employees to understand context of the customer, equip them with better business acumen so they can offer solutions and options for clients and not just routine services,” said Tan Moorthy, VP & Head (education & research), Infosys.

The transformation type of contracts, like the ones that IBM and Accenture do, call for understanding the way customer does business and try and evolve new and better ways to do it, which is different from traditional system integration, testing or coding kind of projects that technology companies like Infosys have been used to.

read more......

Sparsh BPO opens centre in Dehradun

MUMBAI: Sparsh BPO Services, the domestic BPO subsidiary of Intelenet Global Services Pvt Ltd (Intelenet) launched a delivery centre in Dehradun,Uttarakhand.

The new centre will service India’s leading telecommunications services operator to provide customer support services in the circles of UP (east & west) and Uttaranchal. The centre has an existing headcount of 1200 agents making Sparsh one of the leading employers in Dehradun.

Speaking on the launch, Susir Kumar, managing director and chief executive officer, Intelenet Global Services said, 'We are delighted to partner with India’s leading telecom giant to set up this facility. In addition to expanding our footprint in North India, this centre will also strengthen our delivery capability in the telecom vertical."

Radhika Balasubramanian, COO, Sparsh added, “Dehradun offers good connectivity with the major cities in North and also provides a young talent pool qualified with several north Indian languages including English, Hindi, Punjabi, Dogri, Himachal, etc. Our foray in the city will provide us access to a skilled workforce while providing employment opportunities to potential domestic candidates."

As per report by Ernst & Young, the domestic BPO market, with a growth rate of 50% over the last five years, is expected to reach $1.6 billion in FY 2008. At a CAGR of 38%, the market is projected to reach $6 billion by FY2012, with a maximum addressable opportunity of $16-19 billion.

Intelenet was the first International BPO to venture into the domestic BPO sector with its acquisition of Sparsh in 2005.
Sparsh currently has over 40 client relationships with leading multinationals across telecom, banking, insurance, consumer durables, retail, media, aviation & public sectors. Intelenet is the leading domestic BPO to provide services in 15 languages with centers in Mumbai, Thane, Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Mohali, Kolkata, Gurgaon and Delhi.

After having established a firm footprint in the West & South, adding facilities in Thane and Bangalore in 2009, and Puducherry in 2008, Intelenet is now augmenting its presence in Northern India. Intelenet already has domestic facilities in Mohali.

Source: http://infotech.indiatimes.com/