XIBMS – BPO – BANE OR BOON ?
XIBMS – BPO – BANE OR BOON ? XIBMS – BPO – BANE OR BOON ? Several MNCs are increasingly unbundling or vertical disintegrating their activities. Put in simple language, they have begun outsourcing (also called business process outsourcing) activities formerly performed in-house and concentrating their energies on a few functions. Outsourcing involves withdrawing from certain stages/activities and relaying on outside vendors to supply the needed products, support services, or functional activities. Take Infosys, its 250 engineers develop IT applications for BO/FA (Bank of America). Elsewhere, Infosys staffers process home loans for green point mortgage of Novato, California. At Wipro, five radiologists interpret 30 CT scans a day for Massachusetts General Hospital. 2500 college educated men and women are buzzing at midnight at Wipro Spectramind at Delhi. They are busy processing claims for a major US insurance company and providing help-desk support for a big US Internet service provider-all at a cost upto 60 percent lower than in the US. Seven Wipro Spectramind staff with Ph.Ds in molecular biology sift through scientific research for western pharmaceutical companies. Another activist in BOP is Evalueserve, headquarterd in Bermuda and having main operations near Delhi. It also has a US subsidiary based in New York and a marketing office in Australia to cover the European market. As Alok Aggarwal (co-founder and chairman) says, his company supplies a range of value-added services to clients that include a dozen Fortune 500 companies and seven global consulting firms, besides market research and venture capital firms. Much of its work involves dealing with CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CIOs, and other so called C-level executives. Evaluserve provides services like patent writing, evaluation and assessment of their commercialization potential for law firms and entrepreneurs. Its market research services are aimed at top-rung financial service firms, to which it provides analysis of investment opportunities and business plans. Another major offering is multilingual services. Evalueserve trains and qualifies employees to communicate in Chinese, Spanish, German, Japanese and Italian, among other languages. That skill set has opened market opportunities in Europe and elsewhere, especially with global corporations. ICICI infotech Services in Edison, New Jersey, is another BOP services provider that is offering marketing software products and diversifying into markets outside the US. The firm has been promoted by $2-billion ICICI Bank, a large financial institution in Mumbai that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In its first year after setting up shop in March 1999, ICICI infotech spent $33 million acquiring two information technology services firms in New Jersy-Object Experts and ivory Consulting – and command Systems in Connecticut. These acquisitions were to help ICICI Infotech hit the ground in the US with a ready book of contracts. But it soon found US companies increasingly outsourcing their requirements to offshore locations, instead of hiring foreign employees to work onsite at their offices. The company found other native modes for growth. It has started marketing its products in banking, insurance and enterprise resource planning among others. It has earmarket $10 million for its next US market offensive, which would go towards R & D and back-end infrastructure support, and creating new versions of its products to comply with US market requirements. It also has a joint venture – Semantik Solutions GmbH in Berlin, Germany with the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering, which is based in Berlin and Dortmund, Germany – Fraunhofer is a leading institute in applied research and development with 200 experts in software engineering and evolutionary information. A relatively late entrant to the US market , ICICI Infotech started out with plain vanilla IT services, including operating call centeres. As the market for traditional IT services started wakening around mid-2000, ICICI Infotech repositioned itself as a “Solutions” firm offering both products and services. Today , it offers bundied packages of products and services in corporate and retail banking and include data center and disaster recovery management and value chain management services. ICICI Infotech’s expansion into new overseas markets has paid off. Its $50 million revenue for its latest financial year ending March 2003 has the US operations generating some $15 million, while the Middle East and Far East markets brought in another $9 million. It new boasts more than 700 customers in 30 countries, including Dow Jones, Glazo-Smithkline, Panasonic and American Insurance Group. The outsourcing industry is indeed growing form strength. Though technical support and financial services have dominated India’s outsourcing industry, newer fields are emerging which are expected to boost the industry many times over. Outsourcing of human resource services or HR BPO is emerging as big opportunity for Indian BPOs with global market in this segment estimated at $40-60 billion per annum. HR BPO comes to about 33 percent of the outsourcing revenue and India has immense potential as more than 80 percent of Fortune 1000 companies discuss offshore BOP as a way to cut costs and increase productivity. Another potential area is ITES/BOP industry. According to A NASSCOM survey, the global ITES/BOP industry was valued at around $773 billion during 2002 and it is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of nine percent during the period 2002 – 06, NASSCOM lists the major indicators of the high growth potential of ITES/BOP industry in India as the following. During 2003 – 04, The ITES/BPO segment is estimated to have achieved a 54 percent growth in revenues as compared to the previous year. ITES exports accounted for $3.6 billion in revenues, up form $2.5 billion in 2002 – 03. The ITES-BPO segment also proved to be a major opportunity for job seekers, creating employment for around 74,400 additional personnel in India during 2003 – 04. The number of Indians working for this sector jumped to 245,500 by March 2004. By the year 2008, the segment is expected to employ over 1.1 million Indians, according to studies conducted by NASSCOM and McKinsey & Co. Market research shows that in terms of
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