Wachovia's Change of Heart

Businessweek
The bank took a long time to discover the virtues of outsourcing -- but now it admits they're irresistible. Still, it's not sending any call-center work overseas While many other large corporations were rushing headlong into offshoring, Charlotte (N.C.)-based Wachovia (WB ) was content to sit on the sidelines -- until now. By the middle of this year, Wachovia will have outsourced 500 to 1,000 jobs, with plans to move an additional 3,000 or so by the end of 2007.
Most, but not all, of those jobs are going to India. An undisclosed number of human resource slots are being outsourced to Hewitt Associates, which will perform some HR functions for Wachovia right down the street from its Charlotte headquarters. SOUL-SEARCHING. Why the change of heart? Peter Sidebottom, director of corporate development and strategic initiatives for Wachovia, says that with a couple of major bank acquisitions on its hands at the time—the bank has pulled off two large-scale mergers with other regional banks so far this decade—Wachovia had a lot on its plate, and knew it could extract plenty of cost savings just from those two mergers. "We felt we had a lot of opportunities to save money without going offshore," says Sidebottom. more...

Offshore Firms Target IT Infrastructure Outsourcing

Computerworld
For most U.S. companies, a 30% year-over-year increase in employees without a major acquisition might make the national news. But in India, that kind of growth is becoming routine for IT services firms. For example, Wipro Ltd. in Bangalore, India, said in its latest quarterly earnings report last week that its workforce had reached 51,000 employees as of Dec. 31—up 30% from the start of 2005. It's a similar, or even better, story at Bangalore-based Infosys Technologies Ltd., which said earlier this month that it had 49,400 workers as of Dec. 31. That amounts to a 40% year-over-year increase. Those gains come as offshore firms and the Indian operations of U.S. vendors are seeking to expand into relatively new areas, such as IT infrastructure outsourcing. Last month, Dallas-based Perot Systems Corp. started offering infrastructure management services from its facilities in India, where 6,000 of the company's 17,000 employees are based. more...

The challenges of outsourcing: Can Dubai's vision become a reality?

Khaleej Times
Dubai is aiming to become a key hub in the region for outsourcing. Is this achievable and what will it mean for the economy? Outsourcing worldwide is big business and the Dubai Outsource Zone (DOZ) is lobbying hard to grab a good chunk of it. It is determined that Dubai should benefit from the outsourcing, or more specifically offshoring, boom and the need for international companies to find better and more innovative ways to reduce costs. If Dubai succeeds the benefits could be huge, not only from the immediate impact on job creation and consumption, but also in generating long-term economic growth by facilitating the development of a mixed economy and accelerating effective technology transfer. But will escalating costs deter potential candidates from coming here and can Dubai's infrastructure grow fast enough to cope with an increased population? How well positioned is Dubai to capture a large share of the offshoring market? more...

Indian legal eagles join BPO boom

IBNLive
They are among the more recent entrants to the outsourcing party. They are the Indian lawyers. If industry reports are any indication, the country's legal eagles could well give much muscle to India's knowledge process outsourcing growth story. The legal services sector is tipped to be the next big offshore destination and corporate lawyers are increasingly hopping on to the outsourcing bandwagon and are handling prestigious international clients. Recent industry reports peg the annual value of legal outsourcing at $80 mn and predict that it will rise up to $4 bn by 2015 - that translates to almost 80,000 more jobs for lawyers in India. more...

A paradigm shift

The Hindu
AFTER having established their credentials in developing software applications primarily to enhance back-offices of organisations across the globe, Indian software companies are now all revved up to embrace the development of customer-facing software products and are growing significantly in the outsourced product development (OPD) space, thus bringing forth a paradigm shift in outsourcing. Seen as an indicator of the maturity of the outsourcing business in India, the Indian OPD market is expected to grow to $11 billion by 2008 (Nasscom-McKinsey report). While major players like Oracle, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have product development centres in India, venture capitalists are investing significantly in smaller players. more...

More CSRs Are Staying Home

DestinationCRM.com
The number of contact center agents wearing their pajamas as their professional garb is expected to continue to gain traction throughout the decade, according to a new IDC report. "Home-Based Agent 2005-2010 Forecast and Analysis: Converging Economic Forces to Drive the Expansion of Homeshoring in the United States" predicts that the number of U.S. at-home agents will nearly triple, from an estimated 112,000 in 2005 to more than 300,000 by 2010. The report, which explores the growing market for home-based customer care agents, also examines providers that are influencing this market's growth, including Alpine Access, LiveOps, VIPdesk, West, Willow, and Working Solutions. The trend within the outsourcing industry to tap the nation's work-at-home agents is spurred by a collection of drivers, including organizations' needs for more productive agents and enhanced retention rates. Workers can be "more productive and enthusiastic [working] from home, because they don't have to deal with going into work five days of the week to the call center," says Stephen Loynd, senior analyst for IDC's CRM and Customer Care BPO service. Also, workers' familiarity with American culture and English may make them better suited to field certain types of customer care calls that may demand a higher level of sales skills, compared to someone working in another country. These points also were highlighted in the research firm's 2004 report "An Alternative to Offshore Outsourcing: The Emergence of the Home-Base Agent." But Loynd notes that its most recent installment examines macroeconomic factors that are contributing to a healthy growth rate for home-based agents, citing technology enhancements, increased oil prices, and increased cost of living. more...