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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

 IBM Daksh was named 2010 Contact Center Outsourcing Service Provider of the Year in Asia Pacific for a fifth year in a row by renowned consulting firm, Frost and Sullivan.

IBM Daksh was accorded the prestigious award at the recent 2010 Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific ICT Awards.

IBM Daksh was cited for showing exemplary growth and performance in 2009. The award involves multiple stages of evaluation by analysts and industry experts based on several criteria: customer acquisitions, customer diversification, breadth of service offerings, financial performance as evidenced by revenue and revenue growth and overall contribution to the industry.

Frost & Sullivan follows a rigorous measurement based methodology to select the winner in each category. Read the rest of this entry »

The ITeS pecking order has changed little over the past five years. Genpact, which was spun out of GE, remains perched on top, with $1.12 billion in
revenues. Most of the other players are jockeying for other positions.

But there’s a 1,000-pound gorilla that has come from nowhere to climb to the number three position, and could well unseat Genpact in the coming years. That is TCS, India’s largest IT company, which is further proof that an integrated IT-ITeS is the model of the future.

For TCS, ITeS means going back to its roots. In 1968, TCS was formed as a BPO company, providing technology helpdesk services to Tata Group companies. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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). Read the rest of this entry »