Indian data breach hits HSBC

IT Week
The practice of moving customer data to offshore sites has come under fire again after a security breach at HSBC's offshore data processing site in Bangalore led to £233,000 reportedly being stolen from a small number of UK customers. An HSBC spokesman confirmed the bank had commenced legal action against an employee who had passed customer information onto fraudsters, claiming that it would "pursue a conviction as aggressively as possible". He added that the fraud had been detected by HSBC's security procedures and that all affected customers had been informed and reimbursed. However, the incident is likely to increase pressure on HSBC and other UK firms with offshore data handling facilities to reassess security processes after reports claimed the HSBC employee had used false records to obtain the job. more...

Film on Indian outsourcing to be screened in US

Economic Times
Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night", an award-winning documentary on outsourcing work to India, is being screened this month in New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Told from the perspective of an Indian living in the US, the film journeys into India's call centres, where telemarketers acquire Western names and accents to service the telephone-support industry of the US. This film incorporates animation, live action, and archival footage to explore the complexities of what it terms as "globalization, capitalism, and identity". Screened first over the last year, the film has won awards at Uruguay, the Humboldt film festival, NextFrame Film Festival and Rosebud Film and Video Festival, among others. Directed and written by Indian American Sonali Gulati, this film now gets shown at the Urban World Film Festival, New York, on June 22 and 24, at the Artwallah Festival in San Pedro Los Angeles on June 24, at the 29th Asian American International Film Festival in New York on July 16, and via WYBE Public TV station, Philadelphia, on Aug 2 and 5. With a runtime of 27 minutes, the film has been described as giving "a behind-the-scenes look at outsourcing through interviews with workers competing fiercely to staff the steadily increasing number of call centers based in India". more...

TCS bags orders worth $30 mn

Economic Times
India's largest software services exporter, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd, said on Monday it had received two orders from South America worth over $30 million. One of the orders was for managing the business process outsourcing and information technology operations for Transantiago, the public transportation system in Chile's Santiago city, the company said in a statement. The other was a five-year contract to manage back office operations for a banking and financial group, which Tata Consultancy did not name. more...

India's offshore IT revenues hit US$13.3B

ZDNet
Revenue across India's booming offshore IT software and services industry grew by 33 per cent over the last year, hitting a new high of US$13.3 billion. The annual figures from India's IT trade body Nasscom, for the financial year 2005/06, also show a 37 per cent rise in the country's business process outsourcing (BPO) revenues to US$6.2 billion. Nasscom's predictions for growth in the next 12 months show no sign of India's position of dominance in offshore IT and BPO services being lost any time soon. Combined IT services and BPO revenue for the financial year 2006/07 is expected to grow by up to 30 per cent, to between US$29 billion and US$31 billion. This continued level of growth will put India's offshore outsourcing industry on target to hit revenues of US$60 billion by 2010, according to Kiran Karnik, president of Nasscom. He said in a statement: "In the last year India's strength has emerged through large client wins, cross-border mergers and acquisitions, movement of the industry towards a stable pricing model and a gradual positive shift in the outsourcing debate." But Karnik warned India also needs to address concerns about the quality of its graduates and the country's poor physical infrastructure. A separate report by research company Everest last month also claimed India will maintain its low-cost IT skills advantage in the offshore outsourcing market for at least another 30 years. more...