Som Mittal, President of National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) has said outsourcing business in India has
witnessed more than nine times growth, from 1.6 billion dollars to 14.7 billion dollars in the last decade.

Addressing media persons here on Wednesday, Mittal said: “In this last decade, from 1.6 billion, we rose to 14.7 dollars.” He further said that India’s back-office outsourcing business would post a growth of 15 to 16 per cent in 2010 to March 2011 on growing demands from overseas clients. There is a growth in the employment sector as well, as far as the BPO industry is concerned.

He pointed out that even two-tier cities have become the hub of IT industry and software development. “Today, BPO industry is in 50 cities and towns. I think that’s very significant, so, a large part of the business did come from top six-seven cities, but the fact that they are already in 50 cities, is very significant,” he added. Read the rest of this entry »

Kofax plc /quotes/comstock/23s!e:kfx (UK:KFX 235.00, -5.00, -2.08%) , the leading provider of document driven business process automation solutions, today announced it will provide a leading business process outsourcing (BPO) firm in Brazil with a document capture solution to be used in servicing a large Brazilian government client. The value of the contract to Kofax exceeds $1.3 million.

The firm will implement Kofax Capture, Kofax Transformation Modules and Kofax Monitor to capture and classify approximately 230 million images scanned from a wide variety of tax forms, court cases, and other legal documents it receives annually from its government client. The software will enable more than 100 unstructured document types to be automatically identified and classified. As a result, the government agency will improve access to documents, reduce manual tasks and be able to better respond to the needs of its constituencies.

“BPOs and public sector agencies tasked with processing a high volume of unstructured documents are investing in document capture solutions to take the costs and labor out of paper-intensive business processes,” said Alan Kerr, Executive Vice President of Field Operations at Kofax. “We provide compelling value for our customers by enabling them to deliver better data quality, improve customer service levels and generate a fast, proven return on their investment.” Read the rest of this entry »

Infosys BPO announced that it has won the Breakthrough Award 2009 at the Royal Philips Electronics Global Supplier Awards ceremony held at Eindhoven, in the Netherlands. The Royal Philips Electronics Global Supplier Awards publicly recognize the contribution that suppliers make to the success of the company.

The awards acknowledge the critical role that suppliers play in helping the company meet the challenge of ensuring supply continuity and delivering innovative, cost-effective products of unequalled quality to fulfill the growing demands of the company

Infosys BPO was awarded for several strategic initiatives it undertook during the course of 2009, such as joint implementation of transaction based pricing, transitioning of activities to offshore centers in India and China, enabling Philips to cut costs and harmonize processes, and opening a new delivery center in Brazil to service Philips in the LATAM region. Read the rest of this entry »

Essar Group’s IT and BPO arm, Aegis, is open to acquisitions in the Indian BPO segment which would help it grow rapidly in its core business, a top company official said.

“We are open to both organic and inorganic growth domestically. We would acquire an Indian BPO company if it is strategically significant to us,” Aegis’ Managing Director and Global CEO, Aparup Sengupta, said here.

Besides, Aegis is also looking at strategic investments in Latin America and Africa, Sengupta said, adding the company currently has 6-7 deals in the pipeline.

“We are also venturing into Enterprise Global Shared Services (E-Gloss) in a big way. Here too, we are open to both organic and inorganic way in this arena too,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »