Indian IT-BPO industry to sustain its global edge

Hyderabad, Apr 23: The Indian IT-BPO industry is now looking to the future with great hope and expectation and having maintained its lead in the global markets, now the country has to focus on sustaining the advantage, KPMG Executive Director Pradeep Udhas said today.

Participating at a discussion on 'Emerging Destinations for India IT/ITES industry' at an Emerging Companies Forum jointly organised by the KPMG and NASSCOM here. Mr Udhas said a great deal would depend on the technology outlook and other business trends that would define these segments going into the future and on how India interpret these signs and builds up steam to address these emerging opportunities.

He said sourcing was viewed by most companies as a global activity and had now become a core part of the business strategies of large companies. In addition to the increasing number of back-office services, such as payroll, HR and customer care, companies were now outsourcing their core businesses processes.

He highlighted the opportunities and provided key trends in emerging destinations like Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific and North America. He pointed out how increasingly important and imperative it was for the India-centric IT/ITES companies to scale-up their delivery capabilities in these regions.

He said in comparison with strong and balanced presence of foreign companies in the new emerging locations, Indian companies are yet to reach the scale in globalization. ''As Governments of emerging markets take steps to position their countries to take advantage of the growing IT sector, we are likely to witness the emergence of newer IT destinations.'' The KPMG Executive Director said Indian companies could follow the hub-spoke model by setting up offshore centres in regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and so on. These regions offer comprehensive and compelling value proposition, making it a win-win situation for both the Indian IT/ITES industry, as well as for emerging global IT/ITES designations.

He said the outsourcing market was not new for India and in recent times some new emerging desinations were also aspiring to become IT destinations.

Satyam Computers Vice-President (Corporate strategy and communications) Raghu Bhargava said the Indian ITES-BPO industry had achieved scale and high growth and was ready to expand its footprint across the globe especially in the European Continent. He said India was well known for its talent and next challenge was how to manage different cultures in the globe.

He said the current demand of the outsourcing was a comprehensive total cost advantage, lowering the cost of ownership not just cost of arbitrage and quality of the experience not only the products.

HP BPO President and Country Manager Sanjay Singh said the global delivery model was a key source of advantage of their company which started 17 years back with experience in consolidation of global operations.

He said HP's global presence was in 56 countries and their professionals had great language skills. He said the company had addressed a number of challenges associated with global delivery for BPO.

KPMG Global Chief Operating Officer (IT Advisory) Kumar Parakala said the company was having 60 offices worldwide and 27 development centres across the globe. The company had 31 offices in India, he said, adding the company had developed centres in Malaysia and Singapore.

He said the Central and Eastern Europe region was very attracative and was already seeing some significant investments from many Indian companies. He said Latin America was a high-risk, high-reward region with a large domestic market. Presence of Indian companies in this region was, however, conspicously low in comparison to foreign IT/ITES companies.

He said Canada was an important location for the IT world, but was unlikelly to see significant growth as cost pressures were likely to rise.

He said as global sourcing matures, interest across new sourcing destinations would continue to grow and national boundaries would become less and less relevant.

Indian Companies score lead points in areas such as project management, customer relationship management, transitioning and security and risk management.

However to provide end-to-end solutions and service emerging customer needs, Indian Companies would need to focus on new emerging locations offering the requisite language, transaction processing, high-end programming and knowledge processing skills, he said.

UNI