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Wipro to Start LPO services

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:40:59 -0700

We have been hearing for quite some time that Wipro, India's third largest software exporter is planning to get into legal process outsourcing. Now it is confirmed that as part of its KPO services it would start offering legal process outsourcing (LPO) services for clients across US and Europe. According to Times of India it would be headed by former banker and Wipro BPO senior VP Ramit Sethi.

Wipro will offer services such as patents and contract management. And for the time being won't go all out to lure clients from the fields of paralegal services and litigation support. It presently employs 80 staff and set to appoint more in future.

Wipro unlike its arch rival Infosys does not want to go all out promoting its LPO services. The service is more like an extension to its KPO service. Mr. Sethi is not heading the LPO division, in fact he is in charge of the KPO division. For legal domain skills Madhu Khatri will do the consultation.

Infosys on the other hand is more proactive and has appointed Karlyn Stanley, a former partner in a private equity and an attorney with around 25 years. It has also appointed an offshore director who will be based out of India. Infosys also won't mind getting contracts from hardcore law firms, which is not the case with Wipro.

Mr Sethi while speaking to Times of India said,

The objective is to provide end-to-end services catering to the same global customer. LPO becomes a logical extension given the cost pressures that clients are facing now. We find that there is a very healthy demand for the services.

When we go to market, our first call will be intellectual property-related and contract management work that caters that is outsourced by corporates as opposed to niche legal work for law firms. The LPO currently employs about 80 people and is not very large but from the perspective of the LPO industry where most firms are just starting off, it is quite large.

In the LPO world, there are two kinds of work — corporate outsourcing and law firms outsourcing. We are looking at the former but that doesn't mean we won't take up opportunistic jobs. We have the capability

Triton Logs into LPO domain

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:33:43 -0700

It seems everyone wants to grab a bite of LPO lozenge. After Wipro, now I have this news where Triton Corp Ltd, a Delhi based low end telemarketing firm (mostly outbound calls to US customers) revealed its plans to get into LPO. Unlike Wipro or Infosys the reason is however, not strategic development but getting involved with a sector which is more lucrative. The company would be providing outsourcing services in the legal space, which includes legal transcription, prescription, intellectual property, and patents.

For outbound telemarketing calls, clients pay around $10-$12, whereas with LPO the management will get not less than $50 per hour. Triton, which has three companies in his bag, Saffron Global, Sai Info and Webrizon India, starts to run the operation from March-April 2009. The management is in the final stage of discussion with three legal clients, but citing legal non-disclosure agreements does want to reveal much.

Triton presently has 950 workers on its board and plans to take the number to 1300 by April 2009. The new recruitment will mostly include chartered accountants, lawyers and company secretaries.

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Outsourcing: Why not Pakistan?

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:58:43 -0700

India is shining in outsourcing, but why not Pakistan. I wonder. Pakistan is India’s neighbor. More or less culture, education, people etc are similar. As far as human resource is concerned, If Indians can be trained, Pakistanies also can be trained. I know many a Paksitani software engineers who are very successful in different parts of the world. But it seems more than quality of human resource, it’s that non-industry-friendly image that is doing Pakistan more harm.

Nadeem Ilahi Managing Director and Country Head-Pakistan TRG (The Resource Group) in an exclusive interview with The News said Pakistan has potential in call centre and business process outsource (BPO) industry like any other country.

He said there are three important factors in this business, labour and cost, telecom, and infrastructure. Pakistan is fairly well placed as far as these three components are concern. India is the biggest BPO and call centre industry followed by Philippines. Telecom rates are cheaper in India and Philippines as compared to Pakistan but other costs particularly labour cost in India is twice as high as compared to Pakistan.

“USA buys 80 per cent of global BPO services but the customers are not willing to come to Pakistan due to the US State Department’s travel advisories against Pakistan,” Nadeem said. The BPO business needs people to people contact. Customers’ trainers need to come and train the BPO and call centre employees before they start their campaign. However, he said, in presence of travel advisories the customers’ trainers cannot come to Pakistan to train the workers. Therefore they take their business somewhere else. Source

It seems the problem is stemming from US.

Note: It's difficult to get an image from Pakistan without blood shed and terrorism. This pic is an artist's impression.

Start Ups: 10 reasons to outsource

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:58:43 -0700

I finished reading this article which lays down 10 must have reasons on why a start up organization should embrace outsourcing for high performance. I am not disagreeing with the writer there, only wondering if the start up honchos have the necessary resource (raw cash that is) to deploy these external firms. So, before going all out with outsourcing and getting the bests in the business they would have to have lot of money in the bank. And to get finance conventionally form the banks one needs to have a history of successes or been backed up by legacy. For VC funding, it has to have a billion dollar pioneering innovative proposition that can change or answer an issue (if not more) permanently.

The list goes here

1. Outsourcing lets companies be an expert in everything.
2. Outsourcing extends your business contacts.
3. Outsourcing allows for some flexibility with spending.
4. Outsourcing gives companies a chance to work with people they need but might not like.
5. Outsourcing keeps a company thinking about international opportunities.
6. Outsourcing gives employees a chance to practice their management skills.
7. Outsourcing provides a captive audience for refining a pitch.
8. Outsourcing keeps you from hiring the wrong person.
9. Outsourcing makes companies more efficient.
10. Outsourcing lets companies change direction quickly.

Outsourcing: Why not Pakistan?

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 09:58:43 -0700

It seems the problem is stemming from US.

Note: It's difficult to get an image from Pakistan without blood shed and terrorism. This pic is an artist's impression.

Reverse brain drain to India

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 06:08:20 -0700

What is brain drain? According to Wikipedia, A brain drain or human capital flight is an emigration of trained and talented individuals ("human capital") to other nations or jurisdictions.

As far as India is concerned, its most talented 5% students (the best and the brightest) every year leave for US, UK, Germany, Australia, New Zealand etc. thus creating a havoc for the domestic industries like mechanical, electrical, electronics, civil, instrumentation, chemical, biomedical and lastly software engineering. Same is the scenario with other sectors like medicine and food and beverage etc.

But now as India ii emerging in varied fields (poised for a GDP growth of 8% amidst global slowdown), Indians residing in different parts of the world with relevant experience are coming back to India.

Vish Ramamurti is home again. Sixteen years after leaving India to pursue a better life in the United States, the 37-year-old electrical engineer has returned to Bangalore. There were many reasons for his reverse migration: ageing parents, homesickness and a desire to teach his children his native language. But the real driver was job opportunity. Read

12 points for secure outsourced software development

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 05:01:24 -0700

As more and more organizations are outsourcing software development functions to external companies, they also find themselves at the receiver’s end as far as security risks are concerned from areas like coding practices, infrastructure and operation.

Additional efforts and measures are required to tackle these new security risks. One of the best practices of ensuring secure outsourced software is to enhance a software development process with strict security guidelines and assessments.

Here, you can read a dozen of practices that organizations can follow when outsourcing software code development.

1. Define upfront what is meant by security, including the security environment in which the application is to be used and what other resources could be exposed by a security vulnerability, and include the definition in the contract put in place

2. Validate the security mechanisms to be used upfront and set requirements for their use

3. Ensure that the third party is using software coding best practices and that they are documented and validated

4. Demand proof of the level of training, skills and security awareness among the third party's development staff

5. Ensure that expectations are laid out in the service-level agreement, including milestones and deliverables

6. Define acceptance criteria for the security of applications delivered

7. Provide a list of the most critical flaws that are deemed unacceptable

8. Mandate measures for certifying that code is secure, including the use of automated testing tools

9. Define steps required in the audit process and ensure that all code is audited and certified before payment is made

10. Ensure that the right to audit code and perform security checks is written into the contract

11. Define processes for remediation by the third party and ensure that responsibility for bearing the costs of remediation or legal liability, even after the application has been delivered, are written into the contract

12. Specify in the contract that security checks and monitoring will be continued throughout the lifecycle of that application and lay out the third party's responsibility for fixing flaws found at a later date.

Accounting outsourcing: Why not transfer temporary seasonal work to India

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 03:34:37 -0700

Hmm…India comes handy for all the purposes. Here, I am reading this news where the accounting firm overburdened with inflow of extra accounting work like preparing client tax returns sends much of the seasonal work to an accounting firm which has more than 700 experienced accountants on its board, out of them 140 are certified public accountants (CPAs) and certified accountants (Cas). Pretty impressive! What they are replacing is broadly lower level of work.

Microsoft Redmond Campus Photo Gallery

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:48:09 -0700

While writing the blog post on Infosys training and development center I stumbled upon some photos of Microsoft Redmond campus. World’s most powerful company, ironically goes without power in one of its offices :-). Find out here.

There are many places to see inside the campus. In the Microsoft Store you will find Microsoft T shirt (with positive comments for a change!!). Though in one of the blogs someone said this is one of the ugliest buildings he has ever seen.

Some are awestruck though

Infosys Mysore Education Campus: Photo Gallery

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:16:13 -0700

Infosys Technologies, one of India’s biggest It giants has achieved many a feats 27 years of existence. One of memorable among them is being adjudged by the American Society for Training and Development as the world's best in employee training and development center.

Infosys has created a gigantic training and development center in Mysore (in the southern part of India). It is erected on 380 acres of land. Other than state of the art high tech classrooms, the center houses soccer and cricket field, multiplex theatre along with a intra transportation system to ferry employees from one corner from another. It can accommodate 10,000 people per day. The center is open 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

No wonder. Infosys Technologies chairman, S. Gopalakrishnan termed it as a city by itself. He says the campus is created "to make it inspirational for people to work in the IT industry, and to show that in India you can work in world-class communities.”

Multiplex at Infosys Campus, Mysore

Inside Multiplex

Hostels at Infosys Campus, Mysore

Cycle your way through offices

Amphitheatre

Indian Co on Street to Randomly Recruit Talents

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:00:51 -0700

Such is the out-of-box creative idea from FirstSource Solutions that it is on a plan to randomly recruit talents while roaming around in Mumbai (Bombay) city with a bus.

The initiative is called, “Step in to step ahead”, many calling it a desperate attempt from an Indian outsourcing company which is leaving no stones unturned to get the right talent by hook or crook. Some call it a recruitment gimmick. I also think so, come what the result, people will at least discuss about the effect of the event. May be posting recruitment ads on job sites and newspapers has become passé. Events only happen some times in a year. So, you have this mobile recruitment bus idea hitting the recruitment team.

FirstSource is a call center and since this drive began last Tuesday, almost 50 people have stepped into the bus to apply or enquire for the positions. The campaign will be on for 45 days.

I don’t know the routes the bus will cover, but since this is a call center, to catch a young crowd they may cover movie theatre, lover’s joints (!), and colleges. They may also park the bus next to rail stations. I have heard that in Bombay, local train is the most popular commuting vehicle.

Source

US recession will help IT and BPO industry

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:39:48 -0700

Few days back I read this interview in DNA, where Raman Roy, the man who helped American Express and GE to start their outsourcing operation from India (first of its kind in India) commented that “a mild (??) US recession is good for BPO”, he didn’t mean though, specifically any particular country will be benefited from it, he was speaking in favor of the BPO industry. You can read the interview here.

Now, Gartner has come out with the finding that:

A slowing U.S. economy will push firms to hike IT outsourcing to low-cost locations for savings and productivity, and India has an edge over other countries to attract these deals.

It’s the same old story repeating again,

Overseas firms have given deals to Indian software firms, attracted by an army of English-speaking workers and cheaper wages, but there are concerns about the impact of an economic downturn in the United States on the local companies' revenue. Source

Business Standard writes that there will be two possible scenarios that will have an impact on offshore services adoption in the coming months: temporary economic downturn (best case scenario) or a more sustained recession (worst case scenario). Read in detail here.

Actuarial Outsourcing Taking Shape in India.

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:59:03 -0700

In line with hot global insurance outsourcing market, actuarial outsourcing (they are calling it actuarial process outsourcing or APO) is gathering mosses in India. KPOs in India are all out to woo actuaries with lucrative packages. According to a TOI report, it is estimated that Indian insurance outsourcing industry's revenue will rise from $790 million in 2007 to about $2 billion by 2010. As the market will mature, analysts feel, Indian IT companies which till now only have been doing back office insurance services will try to get contracts of complex actuarial valuations work.

Though there is no such study or research has been done on the scope of Actuarial outsourcing in India or offshore countries (you can expect some in near future or pretty soon), Mohit Thukral, senior VP of Genpact feels that "The global insurance KPO market is estimated to be around $430 million in 2007 and India's share is expected to be about 70% at about $300 million by 2010,"

Sanjiv Kapur, Senior VP Head, Patni BPO says, "Various sources of market research predict the KPO industry to be anywhere between $10 billion to $17 billion by the year 2010. Going by the indication and the response we are seeing from the global market, India has the potential to become actuarial back office of the world."

Present May Be Tense But Future Perfect, Six Point Roadmap from NASSCOM

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 09:55:27 -0700

Nasscom never states fact as it is. Over the years it has consistently acted like a seasoned journalist who is keener in delivering a balanced story, rosy pictures notwithstanding.

For Nasscom it’s a crucial time now, as the scenario is not at its best, it can not really go on painting the media red with its wishful numbers.

Quoting from the Econmoic Times

The Indian IT-BPO industry is headed for a slowdown in growth this year but is on track to achieve its target of exports worth $60-billion by 2010, industry association Nasscom said on Friday.

“There will be some slowdown but growth will happen. The $60-billion target will be maintained and achieved,” said Nasscom president Som Mittal. Mr Mittal said that the Indian IT-BPO industry needs to grow at 22-23% in future to achieve the $60-billion export target, a rate which could be achieved and exceeded easily.

“There will be 4-6 months of sluggish growth but we don’t think there is any long, deep recession setting in,” said the association’s new chairman Ganesh Natarajan. The Zensar Technologies CEO added that in some cases, slowdown has already led to more outsourcing.

Nasscom estimates published in its Strategic Review 2008 pegged Indian IT-BPO industry’s revenue growth in fiscal 2007-08 at 33%, exports at over $40-billion and domestic revenue at over $23-billion. The association would release the final figures for FY’08 in June.

It is not clear though from this report as on 13^th April, 2008, whether the Indian IT-BPO industry has achieved its target.

Anyway, it has chalked out six areas of emphasis in the financial year 2009.

Nasscom Six point agenda

The IT industry body will put thrust on six areas in the financial year 2009. They include: community, collaboration, societal development, inclusivity, green IT, education and skill-building
Nasscom said the Indian IT would tide over the present lull in the market
Ganesh Natarajan, chairman of Nasscom, ruled out long-term impact due to the ongoing US slowdown
Nasscom calls for increased collaboration between the IT and BPO sectors . Source

This is what Som Mittal, president, Nasscom has to say about this six point agenda

We will adopt a six-point agenda to achieve our objective next year. This includes creativity (by tapping new business model), community (enabling professionals to interact across organisation and space), collaboration (between emerging firms and industry associations and countries), adopting environmentally responsive IT technologies, strengthening links with rural India, women and differentially abled section of population

HP-BT Combo Pockets Nycomed Contract

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 09:06:24 -0700

When a company got acquired by another, chance is pretty slim that the acquired one's outsourcing partner would retain the contract. Here, it was not only retained, but the outsourcing company actually has been awarded a meatier deal.

HP has successfully bagged an outsourcing contract from Nycomed, a Switzerland based pharmaceutical company. It will outsource its infrastructure services to HP for next five years. Nycomed has also engaged British Telecom (BT) to support its network related aspects. HP-BT combo will support the pharmacy giant's infrastructure that handles critical real time information across a number of networks. The value of the deal is not disclosed, but it is estimated that it won't be less than €100 million.

Earlier in 2006 October Nycomed aqcquired Atlanta. Quoting from Forbes:

Nycomed is expected to acquire Altana AG's pharmaceuticals unit for around 4 bln eur, according to media reports. Nycomed has outbid a rival suitor, Swedish investor EQT, WirtschaftsWoche quoted industry sources as saying in a pre-release of an article due for publication.

By then Atlanta has already entrusted HP with the outsourcing responsibilities of running of its customer support, life-cycle management of its client environment and the operation of its messaging and mobility solutions. After acquiring Atlanta, Nycomed had reviewed the contract (it took couple of years time though!!) and finally awarded it to HP.

Under the contract, for which a value has not been disclosed, BT and HP have split responsibilities. HP will manage Nycomed's datacentres including 450 servers, as well as migrating 13,000 email inboxes to Microsoft Exchange 2007.

BT will run multi protocol label switching services for Nycomed's wide area network, remote access services for 6,500 users, and also control internet bandwidth in Nycomed's networks around the world. Link

This deal also seems employee friendly, there will be transfer of assets between companies but no staff will be involved. Good for the parties concerned, no bad press will follow them.

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