Aegis Ltd, a BPO company from the Essar Group, will hire 11,000 people in the current financial year, according to its managing director and chief executive officer Aparoop Sengupta.

“We see a huge demand across geographies for BPO services. The hiring is to meet the demand,” said Sengupta.

Meanwhile, looking at the crunch of people to manage customer experience management across sectors Aegis is looking to training and recruiting people.

It has set up Institute of Customer Experience Management (ICEM) to train students specifically for the service industry (retail, banking, financial services and insurance, ITeS) focusing on the customer experience and customer lifetime value. The first batch of 400 people will start from August this year in Coimbatore. (more…)

Kenya should capitalise on the opportunities that are bound to be created following the ongoing economic crisis in the developed world to grow its Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry. NetApp Area Director for Middle East, Africa and Pakistan Martyn Molnar said with the debt stricken Europe and with America trying to recover from the global financial crisis, many companies will be looking to outsource their businesses as a way of cutting their costs.

“There are several challenges facing each of those individual countries which are forcing them to embark on the toughest austerity packages. So you are going to see a move towards outsourcing large portions of their business,” he said.
 
Kenya which is touted as one of the strongest African economies will be a likely beneficiary due to its many advantages including a rising middle class, educated workforce and increased bandwidth. The country also has a big talent pool which has seen many call centres established and set the stage for Kenya to market itself as an outsourcing destination. (more…)

Top back office services provider Genpact has partnered with IT firm Mastek to jointly offer solutions for the insurance industry in the first such alliance in the Indian outsourcing industry. The partnership will be for the US market from where Genpact gets a majority of its revenues. Genpact will leverage Mastek’s IT skills and knowledge in the insurance industry, while Mastek will benefit from the BPO firm’s reach in the US market.

“We plan to outline our joint go-to-market strategy to analysts very soon. We believe the proposition will be of mutual value to both of us and to customers,” said Mastek CMD, Sudhakar Ram. The US insurance industry is around 5-7 times of the UK insurance industry and the potential opportunity to grow revenues is proportionate, Mr Ram added. Mastek has chosen to stay away from BPO services even as most IT companies have started offering it. It earns over 50% of its revenues from Europe, primarily UK.

Genpact and Mastek will offer joint information technology and business process management solutions to large and mid-size insurance carriers and develop platform-based solutions for policy services, billing, claims, distribution management, and new business and underwriting. A platform is a standardised offering that allows processing of many transactions with minimum manual processing. It allows service providers to price based on transactions instead of number of people thus helping to break people-dependence on revenues. Source

The IT/BPO sector not only created more employment opportunities in the last three months of previous fiscal but workers engaged in this segment also saw the maximum rise in earnings, a Government survey said.

It said during the September-December quarter, about 5.67 lakh jobs were created in this sector while another 1.25 lakh jobs were generated in the January-March quarter this year. The survey conducted by the Labour Bureau under the Ministry of Labour and Employment, covered eight sectors which were affected by the global slowdown including IT/BPO.

In terms of earnings also, it said “the maximum increase in earnings was also seen in the ITO/BPO sector where it increased by 9.3 percent during the January-March period. The survey said that overall job increase in eight selected sectors was to the tune of 0.61 lakh in the January-March period. (more…)

The Kerala Information Technology Department’s efforts to showcase the State as a natural hub for information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services got a boost with Wipro chairman Azim Premji expressing interest to expand his company’s footprint in Kochi.

Wipro is a major player in IT landscape of the city with a full-fledged private campus at Infopark in Kakkanad. The 10-hectare campus has a built-up space of 10 lakh sq.ft. It employs 1,900 people and focusses on software development, with domestic and international clients.

Mr. Premji’s announcement focussing on business process outsourcing (BPO) ventures in Kochi had only confirmed the speculation to that effect. At the request of Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan, during the course of their meeting on Thursday, Mr. Premji agreed to expand the campus with prominence to BPO ventures in the domains of law and finance. (more…)

Employment in the IT/BPO sector has showed the highest increase at 6.9 lakh during 2009-10. This is according to the sixth quarterly survey by the Ministry of Labour and Employment to assess the effect of the economic slowdown on employment in the country. Employment has increased by 0.16 per cent in the textiles, leather, metals, automobiles, gems and jewellery, transport, IT/BPO and handloom sectors during the January- March 2010 quarter as against the corresponding quarter last year.

In absolute terms, employment in the eight sectors grew by 10.66 lakh in the quarter under review as against the corresponding quarter last year.

The survey also points out that the IT/BPO sector has shown the highest increase in employment at 6.9 lakh during the year 2009-10. Employment increased in all sectors other than textiles and handloom which showed a marginal decline. Overall employment for the quarter ended March 2010 grew by 0.61 lakh over the December 2009 quarter. But in textiles, employment declined by 1.19 lakh during the same quarter. (more…)

Gautum Thapar’s Avantha Group on Wednesday announced that it had acquired US (Florida)-based Pyramid Healthcare Solutions in a deal that values it at $20 million (Rs 92.54 crore).

Avantha has paid $14.5 million upfront and the balance will be paid after two years for a 100 per cent stake in Pyramid. Avantha Group CMD Gautam Thapar said, “Avantha has an established presence in the IT & ITeS space in the US. This acquisition will strengthen our global presence in the niche healthcare solutions sector.”

The Pyramid acquisition will help the company mark its front-end presence and leverage the Pyramid Healthcare Solutions brand and relationships and provide a key platform to scale up domain expertise in the US healthcare market. It will also help offer customers cost-effective end-to-end Revenue Cycle Management services, enabling hospitals to streamline patient billing and collection processes.

Manoj Malhotra, CEO of Avantha Group’s IT & ITeS company, Salient Business Solutions, will have additional responsibility as president of Pyramid Healthcare Solutions. ‘‘This acquisition is a strategic fit to boost our growth plans,” he said. Source

IT outsourcing firm Sutherland Global Services on Wednesday said it has acquired India-based Adventity Global Services, the latest in a string of acquisitions in the sector.
The all-cash deal was valued at about 2.5 billion ($55 million) with Adventity expected to record revenue of $50 million in the next 12 months, a source said on condition of anonymity.

The purchase of Adventity will help Sutherland, which is backed by Standard Chartered Private Equity and Oak Investment Partners, to firm up its presence in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Dilip Vellodi, chairman and chief executive of Sutherland, told Reuters.

These regions account for about 15 percent of a $175 billion global outsourcing services market, with U.S. constituting 65 percent and Europe making up the rest, he added. Funded by Norwest Venture Partners, CIBC and DA Capital in 2007, Adventity employs over 2,500 people who service the banking and financial, airline and travel sectors. (more…)

A Bangalore based IT firm Radiant Info Solutions, which is one of the key sponsors of 20-20 cricket tournament is set for a public private partnership with the prison authorities to start the first ever BPO behind bars. The idea developed from a conversation between G N Gopinath Reddy, the director general of prisons and C Narayanacharyulu, director of the Radiant Solutions.

The officials believes that providing jobs to the inmates in the IT sector can help find jobs easily after their release. Research shows that there are about 40% of the prisoners in the Cherlapally Central jail of Hyderabad who are educated and can contribute to the working of this project. With two to three months of training, the prisoners are likely to earn about 120Rs per day replacing the average per day wage of 15Rs for a traditional worker in a prison.

Radiant Officials states that the prisoners would be initially allowed to work on the back end processes like data entry for bank related queries. The BPO behind bars would operate in three shifts and round the clock. Though the company is planning to take about 200 to 250 inmates, at the beginning they would focus on 70 prisoners capable for this job depending upon their aptitude and interest levels. The company is expecting to have British as well as US clients in future. With this news widespread, there is havoc in the minds of customers about their information theft. But banks like Goldmans Sach, Royal bank of Scotland and Marks and Spencers states that it is completely safe as sensitive data is not being shared with the prisoner. Moreover, the convicts of fraud and robbery would not be allowed to work in the project. Source

Infosys BPO, the business process outsourcing subsidiary of Infosys Technologies, has launched an enhanced offering in the areas of sales support and fulfillment operations.

The sales support suite of services will reduce the amount of time spent by sales organizations in non-value adding administrative tasks, thereby freeing up time and enhancing productivity, a company release said. The suite of services includes lead qualification, customer profiling, quoting, pricing, service revenue assurance and channel partner support.

The fulfillment operations suite of services is designed to optimize and drive efficiency in the supply chain operations of an organization.

The portfolio includes multi-industry services including order management, demand planning, replenishment planning, inventory management, forward and reverse logistics support. The sales and fulfillment practice currently accounts for close to 20 per cent of Infosys BPO’s revenues through the services offered to client groups, including multiple Fortune 500 companies across geographies and industry verticals. Source