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…)