Shimoga, the home town of chief minister BS Yeddyurappa and BJP state unit president KS Eshwarappa, is set to become a business process outsourcing (BPO) hub soon.

David Andrews, CEO of Xchanging, who is part of Cameron’s business delegation, signed the MoU with the state owned enterprise KEONICS managing director Harikumar Jha, to develop a special economic zone (SEZ) in Shimoga, in the presence of Yeddyurappa, on Wednesday, Jul 28. This global business processor, will develop the new SEZ with a state-of-the-art processing centre on six acres of land.

It will thus be among the first multinational firms to set up a centre in a tier-3 location in the country. The BPO will have an initial capacity of 1,000 people with an option to scale up to a 2,000-seat centre

“We have received tremendous cooperation from the state government. We are looking forward to expand our business in the state,” Andrews said. (more…)

With business process outsourcing (BPO) segment witnessing de-growth for the past two years, HCL Technologies has decided to transform it into business plus service platform and call it Business Services. This was disclosed by Vineet Nayar, Chief Executive Officer, in an interview with this correspondent over telephone on Thursday.

Under this, the company would offer integrated platform along with people as a business package and charge the clients on a per transaction basis. As a step towards this, HCL Technologies, had acquired a leading U.K.-based BPO provider Liberata Financial Services (LFS) to provide comprehensive end-to-end administration and customer services for the life insurance and pension industry. The company’s insurance practice would be strengthened by LFS’ core capability to manage complex transactions. It had decided to invest $30 million in eight quarters in transforming the BPO business.

Mr. Nayar said the company was also planning to set up capability centres in Chennai, Bangalore, Noida and Hyderabad. These centres would act as a special force to create a global capability to compete with the skill sets in the U.S. and the U.K in the SAP and Oracle platforms. It proposed to recruit 1,000 engineering graduates with skill sets in SAP and Oracle platforms. They would be trained by capabilities consultants of HCL, Axon of the U.K. (more…)

India’s second largest software firm, Infosys Technologies could potentially overtake information technology (IT) services in overall revenue. Infosys BPO currently contributes to around 5 percent of the firm’s total revenue, said Chief Executive S. Gopalakrishnan. “If you take BPO (business process outsourcing) alone, it can be even bigger than IT services because that addresses something like 15-20 percent of spend for our client organization, whereas IT typically addresses 2-5 percent of expenditure for our clients,” reports Surabhi Agarwal & K. Raghu from The Mint.

Ritesh M. Idnani, a member of Infosys BPO’s Executive Council and its chief operating officer said that Infosys BPO is aiming to quadruple its revenue to $1 billion (Rs4,730 crore) in three years, riding a rebound in demand for outsourcing. For the financial year 2009-10, it reported a revenue of Rs1,127 crore while Infosys Technologies’ turnover was Rs22,742 crore.

A significant growth is possible in infrastructure management and systems integration, which now contribute only 7-8 percent of the total revenue. While Infosys BPO continue to target verticals such as finance and accounting and human resource outsourcing– low-hanging fruits for the industry Idnani said there is a new focus around areas such as warranty support and digital commerce. Around 50 percent of the company’s deal pipeline still comprises of finance and accounting-related contracts. (more…)

How does the hiring process in BPOs differ from that in other industries?

In the BPO industry, we typically hire a large number of service professionals at one time.For example, after receiving a new client agreement, we could be faced with a hiring need of hundreds of service professionals.Additionally, we need to ramp our programs quickly, so not only do we need to find a lot of qualified professionals, but we need to find them fast.The specific skill sets that we typically look for are candidates who have a strong command of the English language, combines with technical knowledge and, in some cases, IT experience.

What are the various advantages of working in a BPO?

The BPO industry offers many advantages. For one, the work schedule affords individuals the opportunity to be with their families or study during the day, and work in the evening. In addition, service professionals are exposed to many leading global brands, and can quickly become well-versed in the industry and/or technology of the client they support. Stream also provides our service professionals excellent career growth opportunities.In addition to custom-designed classroom and on-the-job training, Stream offers many interesting career development opportunities, enabling service professionals to assume new skills and leadership responsibilities. In fact, the majority of our team managers today began their careers providing customer service or technical support to our clients, while others have moved into new positions in human resources, scheduling, training and quality. (more…)

Deepak Patel is one of those CEOs who combine financial acumen with technological astuteness. He himself admits that this combination has helped him leapfrog ahead of several others in his career. About 20 years of work experience does not hurt in any case.

Deepak, who is the CEO of Aditya Birla Minacs, has been engineering a series of acquisitions for his company, and these days there is a lot of media attention on the firm. His days with EDS during the time when the company acquired Mphasis must surely be helping him in this regard.

Prior to Minacs, he was managing director and Group COO at Mphasis, and during his time, he was credited with transforming the company’s commodity voice-based business to a high-end, domain-rich knowledge process outsourcing business.

Armed with a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from the MS University of Baroda, he took off to the US to join EDS and did not have to look back at all. His is a success story all the way through. At almost every step of his career his ability and knowledge pulled him through. (more…)

It was a rocky start for the Hard Rock at the Falls Concert Saturday night in the Hard Rock Cafe in Niagara Falls. A poor audio mix contributed to the failings of the first half of the “BPO Plays Pink Floyd” performance.

In fact, the concert’s title was even a bit deceiving. The music, most likely geared more toward rock fans than BPO enthusiasts, was less about the internationally renowned orchestra playing Pink Floyd than about playing other rock classics. Actually, the first half did not even feature much Pink Floyd music at all, leaving audience members restless and frustrated.

A bass-heavy Jeans ’N Classics rendered the famous flute solo in Jethro Tull’s “Living in the Past” almost inaudible — and that was certainly not flutist Betsy Reeds’ fault. No one should be expected to play the flute, of all instruments, above a fully loaded and electrically amplified rock band without a little help. Jeans ’N Classics— a band based in London, Ont., that touts an understanding of symphony orchestra culture — rose to the forefront of the first half and let the strings fade into the background. (more…)

Infosys Technologies has closed down its BPO centre in Bangkok due to inability to scale up operations.

“It was sub-scale. It had around 50 employees and most of the work from the centre had been transferred to other centres,” Infoys CEO S Gopalakrishnan told reporters on the sidelines of the national council meeting of the Confederation of Indian Industry here.

Infosys had taken over the back-office operations of Philips Global located in Poland, Thailand and India in July 2007. The three centres together hired around 1,400 employees.

The employees in the remaining centres would continue to operate from their respective centres, the company said. Source

Leading BPO player Firstsource Solutions today said it has appointed Shalabh Jain as Chief Operating Officer (COO) for its Asia Business Unit. Jain will report to EVP & Head Asia Business Unit Chandra Iyer, a press release issued here said.

Prior to joining Firstsource, Jain was Head-India Business at Mphasis. Jain has over 20-years experience and earlier served organisations like Wipro, Compaq/HP, Wipro GE Medical Systems and IBM Daksh, it said.

“Our Asia business is on a strong growth path with corporates across India looking for business impacting BPO partners. Shalabh’s experience in the sector will bring added value to our team,” Iyer said.

Firstsource’s Asia Business Unit, which contributes 12 per cent to the company’s overall revenue, has over 10,000 employees. Source

This BPO training centre in Peenya Industrial Area is not the normal glitzy establishment in any tech park, which generally brims with young graduates getting accent training. It’s different. This call centre training unit is for disabled people.

‘Samarthanam Shristi’, the training centre by Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled was inaugurated on Saturday. ‘Samarthanam Shristi’, a BPO training programme is initiated in association with the department of welfare of disabled and senior citizens, government of Karnataka, ministry of personnel and public grievances and pensions, department of administrative reforms and public grievances, New Delhi, at the Karnataka Rural Poor Handicapped Womens’ Development Society (KRUPHWODS) office building in Peenya.

According to Samarthanam, the initiative is a unique public-private NGO partnership, the first of its kind along with a similar set up at Hubli, which started functioning recently. (more…)

Unlike the ‘aam admi’, who was hit by the nationwide strike called by Opposition parties to protest against the recent hike in fuel prices, the country’s information technology-business process outsourcing (IT-BPO) companies breathed a sigh of relief as today was a public holiday in the US. The US celebrates its independence day on July 4. But since yesterday was Sunday, the American government had declared Monday as a holiday.

The country’s third-largest software company, Wipro, on Saturday decided to close its offices in Bangalore. Most other companies, including Infosys Technologies, MindTree and MphasiS, on Sunday decided to shut their offices in Karnataka, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the main opposition party at the Centre, is in power.
 
At Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the country’s largest IT services exporter, it was business as usual as transport arrangements were made at some centres and associates were at work by 6 am. Some of them chose to work from home or at a closest location. “The marginal dip in attendance had no impact on our schedules,” said the company in a statement. (more…)