The acute skill mismatch in the labour-intensive BPO industry is spawning a whole new breed of BPO schools in the country.

NIIT with Genpact, has set up a JV, NIIT Institute of Process Excellence (NIPE) which has a mandate to train over 100,000 people in two years.
All of the top 15 Indian BPO firms are likely to join the initiative. Lathika Pai, co-founder of B2K, has just set up a BPO training outfit called Fides Global Consultants.

IGNOU will soon start offering, in alliance with Accenture, a diploma course to train students for jobs in the BPO industry.

Som Mittal, president, Nasscom, says BPO has migrated from vanilla tech support services to supply chain and high-end analytics; so industry needs people with vertical knowledge in insurance, supply chain and retail.

“The world over, even undergrad level people are trained for vocation. In India, on the contrary, even graduates are confused about what career to take up. People are increasingly realising that BPO is a serious career and offers limitless growth opportunity. It’s high time our academia revised the curricula and syllabi to include BPO courses,” said Mittal.

Ashish Basu, president of new business incubation at NIIT, said NIPE will open 200 BPO training centres in three years. Each of these centres will have 10 to 12 faculty members.

IGNOU will offer BPO courses to support practices in finance and accounting, insurance, banking, HR sourcing and category management, customer contact services, healthcare, pharma, engineering services and equity research.

“The BPO industry needs experts in areas like finance and legal matters. We are today forced sometimes to depend on college dropouts or 10th/12th pass people,” says Rincy Roosevelt of Sunbelt Business Solution.  Source

BPO sector’s Hinduja group HTMT Global Solutions said it is in buyout discussions with two US companies and one UK firm to strengthen its portfolio and added that it has lined up Rs 25-crore to spend on expanding its Durgapur operations.

“Two of the companies we are targeting have a revenue close to $50 million, and the revenue of the other firm on our radar has revenue nearer to the $150 million mark ,” HTMT Global CEO Partha Sarkar said on the sidelines of CII’s ‘ICT East’ summit.

“We have a $110 million reserve to fund the buys.” However, Sarkar did not elaborate on when HTMT Global hoped to close any of the deals and the segments in which the target companies operate. The Hinduja outfit derives the bulk of its revenue from the telecom space, followed by the insurance vertical. “We are sticking to our 100 per cent inbound strategies,” he said.

Sarkar said headcount at the Durgapur facility - which currently services Bharti Airtel - would be raised from 1,500 currently to 2,500 by December 2009.

The firm hopes to complete construction of a 1000-seat campus there next year. Till the campus comes up, it would take an additional 15,000 sq ft of built-up space on lease, he added. HTMT Global’s present Durgapur centre occupies 40,000 sq ft.

Few days ago a call centre crime took place in  Chennai, exposing an alleged rape attempt by a call centre trainer, has once again brought to the fore the fact that all is not well with this 24×7 employment environment. Considering the number of educated girls finding employment in Business Process Outsourcings (BPOs), incidents like these may not raise many eyebrows. Still, it is worth noting here that something is fishy in this professional sphere.

The first story that was aired on SUN TV and NDTV went on like this: A 27-year-old call centre trainer with a prominent call centre in Chennai is reported to have lured a 25-year old colleague to his friend’s place and managed to drug her by offering her a drink mixed with date rape drug. The police officer in-charge said that the girl woke up the following day only to find herself sexually assaulted. She then lodged a complaint and the boy was arrested. And later he confessed that he did what she had said in the complaint. A video footage of the boy was also shown: An emotional boy in a bad shape and he was weeping like anything.

One of this writer’s associates met this boy in custody and took stock of the whole incident. The story goes like this: The girl in question is one of not-so-good-conduct and had been going out with this boy for quite some time, and on this particular day, as usual they were together for long, till 11 pm. They together went to the boy’s place and they drugged themselves, and both fell asleep on the same bed.

The following day she woke up, surprised, because she was to go back to her hostel the previous day. Somehow, she managed to get back to her hostel the same morning, but the hostel authorities denied entry and asked her to bring her parents. With no other way out, she described the whole story to her parents. They, having had a lot of trouble with this girl’s lifestyle, found an opportunity in this boy. They deliberately framed a case and cornered him.  Full News

“Global BPO” announced today that it has closed the merger of Stream Holdings Corporation (”Stream”) with Global BPO. The purchase price as previously announced was $200 million in cash. In connection with the acquisition, Stream has also completed its debt financing for a $108 million credit facility.
Global BPO has changed its name to Stream Global Services, Inc. Scott Murray is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Stream Global Services, Inc. and Sheila Flaherty is Chief Legal and Administrative Officer. The company will continue to trade its common stock under the symbol “OOO”, its units under the symbol “OOO.U” and its warrants under the symbol “OOO.WS”.
As previously announced, following today’s closing of the Stream merger and the issuance of $150 million of Convertible Preferred Stock, Stream Global Services, Inc. will commence a tender offering for 20,625,001 shares of its common stock at a price of $8.00 per share. The tender offer will remain open for a period of twenty business days following its commencement.
Scott Murray, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Stream Global Services, Inc. said, “We are very excited about reaching this milestone event. We believe that Stream is an excellent business process outsourcing (”BPO”) company and together we can continue to build upon the earnings momentum and growth that the management team of Stream has created so far. We are also very excited to have the opportunity to create a global, integrated BPO services company that provides a variety of high value, complex BPO services using integrated technology and a combination of off-shore and on-shore solution center locations.” Murray went on to say, “Stream is one of the leading outsourcers of complex technical support services to Fortune 1000 companies. Stream has over 15,000 employees, located in thirty (30) solution centers, in sixteen (16) different countries across the world in places such as North America (Canada and the USA); Latin America in such places as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic; in Europe in such places as Ireland, Holland, Poland, Bulgaria, Italy, France and Germany and in Asia and Africa in countries such as India and Tunisia. Stream currently has over 75% of its service capacity outside of the United States. Over the next several weeks we expect to be meeting with many Stream employees, clients and other key partners to discuss this exciting milestone in the company’s history and the opportunities that are in front of us.” Full News