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…)

India’s first Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) facility in jail will become a reality with the Andhra Pradesh government Wednesday giving its nod to the proposal. As part of jail reforms and to provide income generating opportunities to prisoners, the government decided to allow private industry including BPOs to set up their units in prisons.

Chief minister K. Rosaiah gave the green signal for the proposal at a meeting called to discuss a draft bill to use the services of convicts for social activities. Home minister P. Sabita Indra Reddy told reporters that the chief minister had cleared the proposal, enabling India’s first BPO unit to come up in Hyderabad’s Cherlapally Central Jail.

Under the public-private partnership, Bangalore-based Radiant Info Systems Ltd will set up the unit, to be manned by educated convicts. Out of 2,000 inmates in the Cherlapally jail, the authorities will shortlist 250 convicts. They will be trained for few months before the BPO starts its operations. (more…)

Hinduja Global Solutions (HGSL), a business process outsourcing company and part of the Hinduja Group, today announced that it had bought UK-based customer relationship management company Careline Services. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition will act as a launch pad for HGSL to enter the UK and European markets and will also be a platform to cross-sell its global delivery model to Careline’s European clients. Ashok P Hinduja, chairman of Hinduja Group India, recently told Business Standard that the group was looking to acquire BPO units in the UK and the US as part of its plan to deploy idle cash. HGSL had a cash and cash-equivalents of Rs 648 crore as of March 31, 2010, of which Rs 577 crore was with Pacific Horizon, a wholly-owned Mauritian subsidiary.
 
Hinduja had said that the BPO deals were expected to be finalised over the next few weeks. While the BPO outfit in the UK, with which the Hindujas were in talks, had sales of around 25 million pound (around Rs 170 crore), the US company had revenues of $250 million (around Rs 1,000 crore). (more…)

IT firm MphasiS on Tuesday announced the launch of a 500-seater Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) centre in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. To start with, the centre will provide services to telecom operator Idea Cellular. The Raipur centre, to be part of a network of centres in the region, would work closely with MphasiS’s Indore Hub, the company said in a statement.

MphasiS, an HP Group company, provides applications services, remote management services and BPO services to clients in financial services, healthcare, government, communications, transportation, consumer and retail industries.

The BPO centre, which would eventually house over 500 employees, aims to expand exponentially and create job opportunities in the state, it added.

“This centre is a reflection of our commitment to inclusive growth, and leveraging talent available in the state,” MphasiS BPO Business Unit President Raj Patil said. Source

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…)

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

Business process outsourcing firms across the country are drawing in new leadership as they face challenges in services delivery and
growth. The $11-billion, decade-old sector that redefined working out of India for global Fortune 500 companies for thousands of youngsters fresh out of college, is now looking for fresh faces to drive its next phase of growth.

Last week’s change of guard at Firstsource Solutions, with Matthew Vallance replacing MD & CEO Ananda Mukherji, comes close on the heels of Infosys BPO, WNS Global Services and Vertex appointing new heads to run the business.
Keshav Murugesh took over as CEO of WNS Global Services and Infosys BPO appointed Swaminathan Dandapani as CEO. At Genpact, India’s largest BPO company, NV Tyagarajan recently relocated to India from the US where he led the sales effort, to play a bigger role in the company.

“Firstsource was Ananda’s baby. In nine years, he grew it from zilch to about $400 million. There’s a sense of having done something and now you need fresh legs,” says K Sudarshan, managing partner at executive search firm EMA Partners International. (more…)

According to Gartner, the business process outsourcing (BPO) market in India is estimated to grow 19 percent through 2013.
The domestic India BPO services market grew by 7.3 percent year on year in 2009 primarily due to the global economic uncertainty which led to some price and volume pressures.

Gartner estimates the Indian domestic BPO market will grow into a $1.2 billion market by 2011 and grow to $1.8 billion by 2013.

“In the short term, market trends such as changing demographics and affluence levels, consumption of value-based services, increasing focus on service quality and the continued momentum of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) bear watching, as their impact is certain to influence shifts in buyer needs and behavior,” said TJ Singh, research director at Gartner. (more…)

Software exporter L&T Infotech, which has been lagging its larger rivals in growth rates and profitability, wants to add BPO capability  to its portfolio of offerings so it can provide customers with the full range of services starting from application development and testing to back-office processing. The company has appointed one of the big four consulting firms to advise on its BPO strategy. L&T Infotech is a fully-owned subsidiary of engineering giant Larsen & Toubro.

“We want to be able to offer to the full range of services. We already have infrastructure management, independent testing services and application development and maintenance,” said Sudip Banerjee, CEO of L&T Infotech. The consulting firm is expected to submit its report on what sectors and services L&T Infotech should focus on for BPO as well as advise it on suitable delivery locations. In addition, it will also advise the firm on whether acquisitions can be an entry strategy into BPO services.

Wipro and IBM have used their acquisitions of Spectramind and Daksh BPO Services respectively to successfully enter the BPO business in the past. However, Mr Banerjee, a former Wipro executive, said such a strategy, involving the acquisition of diversified third-party BPO provider, was unfit for the current environment when BPO was already a mature industry segment . He said the company was open to niche acquisitions such as captive back-office units of mutlinationals for building its BPO business. (more…)

Aditya Birla Minacs, the outsourcing arm of the Aditya Birla Group, plans to add at least 4,500 seats globally by the end of the fiscal 2010-11, with maximum seats going to the American region.

The company is now gung-ho about the growth potential of the north American region and the prospects in future. After clients such as General Motors adjusted their businesses during the recession period, which affected Minacs’ revenues in the negative, the company believes that things are looking up.

Deepak J Patel, chief executive officer of Minacs, told Financial Chronicle that North America is the growth area and the focus would continue to be there. “We have around 6,000 seats in America and the potential is for 3,000 more seats, which we plan to add by the end of the next fiscal year,” he said. (more…)