Sitel, a global leader in business process outsourcing (BPO) with revenues of $1.8 billion today announced that its Bangalore based BPO center which was originally a JV with ITC Infotech will be rebranded as Sitel India. By reaffirming its strength and brand presence in India, Sitel is positioning itself as one of the largest BPO’s globally by highlighting its footprint in India.

India plays a very important part in Sitel’s growth strategy as there has been consistent delivery and excellent customer service with high returns on investment for all its clients by way of its highly talented and motivated workforce. Safir Adeni, Managing Director and CEO of Sitel India, explains “We are very excited to integrate the Bangalore BPO center with the larger Sitel India family. This expanded footprint and capability would further enhance our value proposition to our global clients while also helping us leverage the Sitel brand in the local region. This is a mutually beneficial and complimentary integration”

Sitel will gain in several ways like attracting the right talent into the organization, retention of employees who will now be a part of a single large global brand, offer world-class options spread across 5 locations in India and more importantly a single entity with a large geographic distribution and communications network which offers great flexibility and choice for it’s clients’ customer care needs.

The focus of Sitel’s business strategy is enabling its over 450 customers globally with the expertise of additional service offerings, providing ability to expand and/or centralize customer care initiatives. Services provided will include - customer service, technical support, sales and saves, outbound sales, acquisition, collections, professional services, back office processing and transaction processing. Source

There is a bad news in store for the domestic IT and BPO market. According to market intelligence firm, IDC India, the local IT and BPO market is expected to grow at 13.4 per cent in 2009, the slowest since 2003. This will come largely on the back of slower IT consumption in some key verticals including retail and financial services. In fact, the Indian domestic IT and BPO market is slated to see 16.4 per cent CAGR in the coming five years leading to 2013, compared with 24.3 per cent growth recorded between 2003 and 2008.The forecast also suggests that key structural changes taking place on the back of a global economic slowdown would propel a new ‘market order’ in the domestic IT and BPO industry. IDC said that the next phase of growth would be different from the earlier phase, in which the domestic market had witnessed unprecedented growth, nearly tripling the market size from Rs 34,000 crore in 2003 to Rs 1,01,031 crore in 2008, a CAGR of over 24 per cent.

The new growth Phase (2.0), expected to evolve from 2009 onwards, will be built on the back of new and innovative services sought by consumers and enterprises alike. The technology behind these services — infrastructure, applications and connectivity — would need to orchestrate and re-orient completely in order to support their mass adoption. Read the rest of this entry »

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is about to win two large BPO contracts as a consequence of its acquisition of Citigroup’s BPO captive,  Citigroup Global Services (CGSL), a company official said on Wednesday. India’s number one IT exporter also announced the completion of the CGSL transaction. The transaction is estimated at $ 512 million and includes a revenue commitment of $ 2.5 billion from Citigroup.

TCS chief operative officer (COO) and executive director, N Chandrasekaran, said an integration team had been formed back in October so as not to lose time. “We will hit the ground running in terms of sales efforts. We’re not going to be reporting only CGSL numbers…Our game is all about integration,” he said. Along with CGSL, TCS BPO will now have around 20,000 employees and the firm expects an annual run rate of $ 600 million in BPO revenues. The TCS stock was down nearly 1% to Rs 478 on the BSE on Wednesday.

The two possible BPO contracts are potential multimillion multi-year contracts. Mr Chandrasekaran said the deals would be “noteworthy” if TCS managed to close them. Through the acquisition of CGSL, TCS has obtained end-to-end financial processing and capability to run core-banking processes.

On the currently challenging business environment, Mr Chandrasekaran said client specific problems continued and certain clients were not growing but that other deals were getting closed and the deal pipeline was good. “In this market you should expect pricing pressure but we are being very disciplined about margins,” he said. Source

Satyam has written a letter to all employees to boost moral after the resignation of three independent directors, and the Maytas fiasco. The letter starts by summarizing that the company continues to be committed to the IT and the BPO business.  The letter starts by summarizing that there are two issues they continue to be committed to the IT and the BPO business. They have said that “The decision was formed with the belief that doing so would not imperil our leadership in our core business or lessen our commitment to our core business and that all stakeholders would benefit. Satyam did not and does not now intend to retreat from the IT and the BPO services in anyway and going forward it will focus exclusively on these markets.”

They have also said in this letter that they have been in talks with most of the clients and have been able to get the support of the clients. They say that, “We have been communicating these facts to our customers and I am very pleased to report that customers continue to show a high level of trust in Satyam. The key steps taken to regain their confidence are we are strengthening the board by changing its size and composition, and engaging DSP ML to provide strategic advice and options. The board will meet on January 10 to consider these options and to chart out a course of action that would boost stakeholders’ confidence further.”

They come and urge that the board and the leadership team, is doing everything possible to bring back the respectability and continue to bring stability to the business. He says that, “I asked for your continued faith in Satyam and for your steadfast focus on your customers especially in phases of wild speculation and unchecked rumour.” So over the past few days we have seen some kind of stability returning. We saw Aberdeen come and say that for them very important thing right now is a stability of the business and this letter is just a start of them trying to restore this faith into their employees. Source

BPOs, IT firms and enterprise users of Internet should be ready for higher prices of bandwidth if they want capacity that is disruption-proof even in case of disasters like the latest undersea cable cuts in the Mediterranean region. Operators are mulling increasing prices for offering round-the-clock or restorable leased line services, top industry sources told ET. Leased lines are dedicated circuits which provide permanent Internet connectivity and are heavily used by IT and IT-enabled services industry for voice and data transfer.

The simultaneous disruption of services on submarine cables SeaMeWe3, SeaMeWe4 (backed by 16 telecom companies) and Reliance Communications’ Flag in the Mediterranean region has highlighted the need for submarine cable operators to have capacity on cables on different routes. While it will provide full redundancy (back-up) in case of a disaster, it will jack up costs for operators. This is because they have to keep capacity free 24X7 on a different cable route. This cost of keeping spare capacity will be passed on to end users.

“Operators are thinking that enterprises must pay more if they want highly secure and reliable connectivity amid increasing incidents of cable cuts. Service providers will keep back-up on another route, rather than on nearby cables, which may also be affected in a disaster,” said the source. While SMW3 and SMW4 have restoration contracts, meaning that one will take the load of another in case of a disaster, in the latest incident, both the systems have been impacted at the same time and in the same region. Coupled with breakdown of Flag, around 80% of users were affected in India. Read the rest of this entry »

Caretel Infotech - a Dalmia group company is upbeat about the opportunities in the BPO space and has hired about 600 people, even while  others are handing out pink slips to employees amid the current slowdown. “In last 30 days, we have recruited 619 employees for our various projects from metros and even small towns like Chindwara at Rajasthan for our Kisaan Call Centre Project. For our various assignments, we will be recruiting more and more people from all over India and train them for the future,” Caretel Infotech Chief Executive Officer Amit Roy said in a statement.

The company also said it is looking at the downturn as as an opportunity to bag more deals, both in the country and overseas.

“We are looking at this slowdown as an opportunity and have started international outsourcing process for some part of the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand to manage the slowdown impact. We have also increased our national clientele as we have bagged assignments from reputed brands like DDA … and soon will close a DTH service provider in India,” Roy said.

Caretel has 13 business centres in India and employs over 6,000 people. It is now expanding its operations overseas and is targeting a significant growth from its global clients. For our international clients, we will be hiring 200 or more people in near future, he added.  Source

Around twenty BPO companies in India switched to back-up routes and circuits to serve their overseas clients, after three undersea cables damaged in the Mediterranean disrupted internet and communication links between Europe, West Asia and parts of Asia. However, smaller call centres which largely run operations on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) are believed to have been hit. India is among the countries that have been badly affected by the undersea cable cuts that occurred on Sea Me We 4, Sea Me We3, and FLAG.

“The SMW4 carries lot internet and voice traffic from India. We also have circuits on SMW4, but we were not impacted as we have a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity policy. We have redundancy both on trans-Atlantic as also the trans-Pacific routes, and so there was no impact on our customers,” said Mr Ranjit Narasimhan, President and CEO, HCL BPO.

Industry officials said the smaller BPOs that do not have redundancies built-in are likely to have been severely hit. “Larger companies have dedicated point-to-point circuits through IPLCs, and they are immediately moved to the spare capacity on other cables. Moreover, the large companies also have their own set of back up through alternate routes,” sources said. Read the rest of this entry »

Architects are now beginning to capitalize on the dynamic outsourcing and offshoring industry, an industry expert said.  United Architects of the Philippines (UAP) regional district C-1 Director Alan Choachuy said today’s pool of young architects, especially fresh graduates, are attracted by the hefty pay that offered by business process outsourcing (BPO) firms for Auto CAD designers.

BPO design firms usually offer a minimum salary of P15,000, while newcomers are paid around P100 to P500 per hour. However, Choachuy admitted this alternative career has slowly created a shortage of draftsmen and apprentice to work for the industry.

“There is a problem on the sustainability of the profession,” he said in an interview, noting the growing preference of younger architects to be employed by BPO firms instead of practicing their profession.

“It’s good on one side because they get employed and they earn their salaries but it is also bad because they cannot apply the skills and the knowledge on architecture in the field,” said Choachuy.

“The skills are not the problem with the new breeds but it is just that most of them prefer the easier way to succeed and it is through going abroad or to work in an outsourcing firm for the US market. But they should learn it the hard way like the way we do it before,” he added. The growing demand for architects in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, Singapore and Dubai also pose as a challenge to the “brain drain” problem of the industry, Chuachuy said. Source

An employee of an Egmore-based Business Process Outsourcing firm has alleged that he was cheated of Rs 1.66 lakh by a Delhi-based loan 
agent. In a complaint filed with the suburban commissionerate on Thursday, Raj of Nanganallur stated that he had applied for a loan and that the loan agent had taken money from him for obtaining some documents but was yet to give him the loan.

According to police officers, Raj, who needed money for his sister’s marriage, came across an advertisement in a English daily offering personal loans. The advertisement, given out by a person called Rajesh Rathod, claimed that the personal loans would come at low rates of investment.

Raj then wrote to the Delhi agent asking him the procedure for applying for the loan. The agent in turn asked him to pay Rs 1.66 lakh over a month, stating that this was required for obtaining various documents and for the verification processes. Raj believed him and paid the money. A few days later, he tried to contact the agent to enquire about the status of the Rs 5 lakh loan he had applied for. Raj alleged that Rathod was unreachable. After more than three weeks of trying to reach the agent, Raj approached the suburban commissionerate.  A case has been registered and investigations have begun.  Source

Motif Inc., a leading provider of business process outsourcing (BPO) services here in Ahmedabad, formally inaugurated its new 450-seat delivery centre in Quezon City in the Philippines . The new centre was inaugurated by Philippines Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) director general Lilia B. de Lima, said Shailly Kapoor, Motif’s business development director.

“Motif has a prestigious portfolio of clients and its presence adds significant value to the economic growth of the country and further enhance Philippines’s reputation as a global BPO hub,” Shailly quoted de Lima as saying at the inaugural event. Motif has been serving clients in the Philippines since 2006. The new centre, which involved an initial investment of $2.5 million, is equipped with the latest technology, she added.

“I am delighted to announce a historic milestone in our company’s history - our new Philippines centre significantly expands our global presence and positions us for solid future growth,” said Kaushal Mehta, Motif’s founder and chairman at the inauguration.

Motif, which has over 800 employees across its delivery centres in Ahmedabad and Quezon City, provides back office support to research and analytics services in the US that cater to Fortune 500 and mid-market clients in the retail, travel, financial services, and legal industries. Source