Offshore Outsourcing - Hot News!

Indian cos 2nd largest biz investors in N Ireland

2007-03-25T23:10:00.000-07:00

Economic Times
Indian companies are the second biggest business investors in Northern Ireland, next only to the US, during 2005-06, Lord Diljit Rana, Honorary Consul for India in Northern Ireland has said.
Companies such as FirstSource, part of ICICI Bank of Mumbai, Polaris Software Lab of Chennai, and HCL-BPO pledged investments of almost 30 million pounds and to create over 1,000 new jobs, Rana, himself a successful entrepreneur, said. All three companies are now fully operational. HCL-BPO operates the biggest independent customer contact centre in Ireland, employing over 2,000 people at operations in Belfast and Armagh. FirstSource has already recruited over 700 of the 1,000 people it intends to hire. It operates two customer contact centres, in Belfast and Londonderry. more...

Americans see job-loss to foreign nations

2007-02-13T00:52:00.000-08:00

Economic Times
Americans see illegal immigration, loss of jobs to foreign countries, natural disaster and energy shortage as events most likely to be major threats to the US in the next five years. Two of these possible threats are seen as extremely or very likely by over half of the public, according to a Harris Poll released Monday, with 55 per cent of all adults putting a large number of illegal immigrants coming in at the top. A significant loss of jobs to foreign countries comes next with 52 percent of adults believing it would be an extremely or very likely threat, according to the results of an online survey of 1,508 US adults Jan 5-12. However, because split samples were used, each individual item on the list was asked of between 400 and 500 adults. more...

TCS to set up largest offshore centre in Karnataka

2007-01-25T22:46:00.000-08:00

Hindustan Times
India's top IT firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is planning to set up an offshore development centre in South Karnataka. The company will invest nearly Rs 1,000 crore to set up the centre, which will house close to 2,000 people, sources close to the development told HT.
This would be one of the largest centres of TCS in the country, which currently employs 83,000 people across the world. This offshore development centre would be undertaking high-margin work such as writing codes for ERP and other package implementation along with some application development and maintenance work. more...

Cost Arbitrage - Globalization - NeoIT

2006-12-24T01:11:00.000-08:00

CIO-Weblog.com
On the on going discussion on the topic of the increasing cost of salaries in India and therefor the loss of the cost arbitrage advantage that created this Industry of outsourcing and put Globalization on the fast track. While doing some poking around for more information I came across this study by NeoIT, which focuses on the areas of Salary cost in the possible offshore locations it focused on the areas of business IT Outsourcing & BPO (Voice / Non Voice).Some methodology on the study, Study is based on data from a survey of leading service providers in Tier 1, 2 & 3 in 20 sourcing destinations including 9 in Europe, Middle east & Africa region (the Czech republic, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia & South Africa) ; 4 in Americas region (Canada, Brazil, Mexico & Costa Rica); and seven in Asia Pac region (China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) analyzing salaries of 3 levels of experience upto 2 yrs, 3-6 yrs relevant experience & Project Manger includes 7-10 yrs. more...

Offshoring Tax Returns Preparation to India

2006-12-03T17:35:00.000-08:00

Researchandmarkets.com
We estimate that in 2011, 1.6 million US tax returns will be prepared from India, for $200 million, for a largely 4-month activity. Significantly, Returns preparation is expected to lead the way for a host of other accounting services that can be effectively outsourced to India.Overloaded CPA firms have increasingly been taking to offshoring tax returns preparation to India. The workload in the peak tax season forces CPA firms to employ seasonal tax workers, and let go of other lucrative professional opportunities, which are typically more remunerative. These include advisory services, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, financial budgeting, MIS reporting, etc. Outsourcing works well to address this situation for CPA firms already challenged by manpower shortages and rising labor costs. more...

India's right on top in Intel's global gameplan

2006-11-03T00:56:00.000-08:00

Economic Times
Even though its India operations felt the tremors of its biggest global restructuring exercise earlier this year, the country remains top priority in Intel’s global strategy. Indian talent ranks among the best in the world, and growing its research capabilities here is, therefore, high on the agenda of the company, says Craig Barett, chairman of the board, Intel Corporation. Speaking exclusively to Corporate Dossier on the eve of his current visit, Mr Barrett hailed the capabilities of Indian engineers in contributing to technology development and innovation within Intel. “The design and engineering teams that we’ve been working with in India have been very prolific and high quality.” With rapidly-evolving technology and once-distant competitors like AMD closing in fast, emerging economies like India hold the key to growth. The Intel India Development Centre (IIDC) in Bangalore is its largest non-manufacturing facility outside the US, with nearly 3,000 researchers working on cutting-edge technologies, and Barrett indicates the company intends to grow that number over time. more...

Long-term visas for foreign CEOs likely

2006-11-02T02:09:00.000-08:00

Economic Times
Decks have been cleared for granting long-term visas to professionals and visa-on-arrival to tourists. While foreign CEOs and business travellers from 18 countries may avail of the multiple-entry visa with five-to-10-year validity, tourists from these nations may be able to enjoy visa-on-arrival facilities at major Indian airports. The home ministry has finally agreed to the tourism ministry’s proposal for relaxing visa norms. The ministry of external affairs (MEA) has already given in-principle support to the proposal. It is learnt that the issue of visa-on-arrival came up at a recent review meeting of tourism infrastructure, chaired by the prime minister. While the home ministry has agreed to consider implementation of the visa-on-arrival scheme, it has said the scheme could not be extended to all categories of travellers and countries due to security reasons. Earlier, the ministry was against the very idea of visa on arrival. more...

Outsourcer Infosys Reports 2Q Revenue Of $746 Million

2006-10-11T20:50:00.000-07:00

Informationweek.com
In a sign that the furious growth of offshore IT outsourcing hasn't abated, India's Infosys Technologies Ltd. reported Wednesday that revenues and income in its just-ended second fiscal quarter jumped more than 40 percent. Infosys, the second largest Indian software exporter, pointed to business deals with U.S. firms that helped drive the impressive results. The firm said revenues for the quarter ending Sept. 30 came in at $746 million -- up 42.4 percent -- while earnings per share expanded by a similar percentage. The Bangalore-based firm said it expects revenues for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2007, will be more than $3 billion. Infosys and other offshore outsourcing firms have been enjoying rapid growth in recent months. "Our business model provides a compelling value proposition to clients in a flat world," said Nandan M. Nilekani, Infosys CEO and managing director, in a statement. "Our robust organic growth coupled with investments in various strategic areas helped us to grow faster in this environment." In trumpeting the results, Infosys noted that it is enabling a leading U.S. cable provider to launch new features. Another important contract with a U.S. airline calls for Infosys to implement Oracle software to transform its finance functions. more...

Where is IT industry headed? Experts opine

2006-10-01T14:30:00.000-07:00

Moneycontrol.com
Where is global information technology held over the next year or so with the US economic slowdown? Will the budget tighten for the CTOs as well and where do Indian companies fit in? An expert panel of global and local experts discuss where global IT is headed over the next twelve months and where Indian companies actually fit in into that picture. The panel includes Peter Bendor Samuel, CEO of the Everest Group who tracks the macrotrends in global IT and one of the Gurus in the IT World, Rod Bourgeous, a celebrated IT analyst at Sanford C Bernstein, which is almost a mover and shaker in the IT world from the equity analyst fraternity and Stan Gibson, Executive Editor of eWeek, one of the world’s largest IT publications. For the local perspective, the panel has B Ramalinga Raju, Head of Nasscom and Chairman of Satyam Computers and Ram Mynampati is President of Satyam Computers. The panel discusses where global and Indian IT is headed over the next twelve to twenty-four months. more...

ABN Amro BPO to up headcount to 5,000

2006-09-19T02:11:00.000-07:00

Economic Times
ABN Amro Central Enterprise Services (ACES), the BPO arm of ABN Amro Bank, is set to scale up headcount to 5,000 by June ’07, across its three locations in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi. ACES is evaluating a number of tier-II cities and State capitals for further expansion. Paul Abraham, managing director, ACES, told ET in Chennai that BPO operations have grown to over 3,700 people, across Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai in the past four years, with an investment of about $50m in infrastructure, IT, staff and training. “We wanted to have critical mass at each of these locations. Having done that, we are thinking in terms of business continuity and disaster recovery,” Mr Abraham said. ACES would create mirror capacities at these centres and integrate operations at the work-flow level. If a disaster were to strike one location, the work would move to some other location seamlessly, he said. more...

Low-cost carriers take to outsourcing to stay fit

2006-09-10T17:20:00.000-07:00

EconomicTimes.com
To mitigate the effect of increasing costs, low-cost airlines are increasingly looking at outsourcing to lower their operational expenses. While Air Deccan is in talks with an Indian company to outsource its maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) needs, GoAir recently announced its joint venture with Singapore Airline Engineering Company to provide MRO services in the country. Some others are also expected to follow suit. Outsourcing fits well in their business model because of the overcapacity in the low-cost airline segment. Indian low-cost carriers (LCCs) are therefore high on outsourcing following a global trend to this effect. “For LCC outsourcing is a good option as it helps in cutting capital costs and increasing efficiency. Besides, by outsourcing they are partnering with the best in industry,” says Kapil Kaul, CEO, Indian Subcontinent and Middle East, Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA). Most LCCs are outsourcing their ground handling and heavy maintenance to an extent. more...

Outsourcing story keeps getting bigger

2006-08-20T18:58:00.000-07:00

Economic Times
Driven by strong demand conditions, new customer additions, big deal wins and employee additions, domestic software companies are set on a high growth path over the remaining three quarters of FY07. Analysts say that a surge in future demand can be gauged from the fact that many big companies, including Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Fidelity, Wells Fargo and GE are looking at outsourcing significant parts of their software development work to Indian software firms. Already in the first quarter, Indian IT vendors both mid and large sized have had significant customer wins and have added 37% more employees on an average year-on-year to meet this robust demand. In the June ‘06 quarter, TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Cognizant, Satyam and Patni together added 253 new clients. The revenue per active customer increased from Rs 15.3 crore in September ‘05 to Rs 18.6 crore in June ‘06. There has also been a surge in offshoring ERP projects. more...

BA's former Indian offshore unit floats on NYSE

2006-08-07T01:34:00.000-07:00

Silicon.com
The former Indian offshore outsourcing unit of British Airways (BA) has raised more than $255m after completing its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). WNS floated at $20 per share on its opening day on the NYSE on 26 July, with shares reaching a high of $25 earlier this week and giving the company a market capitalisation of almost $1bn. The 12.7 million shares offered represent just over 28 per cent of the company. WNS, which reported $202.6m in revenue for the last year, was originally set up by BA as a wholly owned captive business process outsourcing (BPO) division in Mumbai in 1996 to support the airline's back-office operations. The company started offering services to other airlines in 1999 and became independent, with venture capital funds giving private equity firm Warburg Pincus a majority stake in WNS in 2002. more...

Motorola forms JVs with Wipro, Tech-Mahindra

2006-07-26T02:15:00.000-07:00

Economic Times
US-based telecom equipment maker Motorola, on Tuesday, announced two joint ventures in India. One with Bangalore-based Wipro Technologies for managed services and second with Pune-based Tech-Mahindra for application development. ET had reported the JV in its edition on Tuesday. The global telecom major has decided to make this shift because of the change in the market place. The global telecom equipment market has been undergoing a major turbulence in the past couple of years. There has been consolidation due to shrinking margins with Alcatel acquiring Lucent Technologies, Siemens selling its handset business to BenQ. more...

Is the Indian IT safari hitting a roadblock?

2006-07-16T00:16:00.000-07:00

Economic Times
Party’s over, folks. That’s what a new study would have Indian outsourcing companies think, but industry insiders aver it’s far from the truth. With outsourcing being one of the key drivers of the Indian economy, the Chicago-based report almost sounds like the end of the road for India in its bid to be an economic superpower. The study done by consulting firm Diamond Cluster International, predicts that the IT outsourcing boom is over worldwide, including in India, as companies learn to be more strategic. In India, growing labour shortage will see outsourcers shift their focus towards China, the study adds. The report mentions India’s major IT and BPO services hubs, such as Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad, to point out that they’ve reached labour saturation and are looking to tier II cities such as Kolkata, Mysore and Chandigarh for an educated workforce. The study also claims that US-based companies are also ignoring cost factors to outsource to Canada because of proximity and similarities in language and culture. The resource crunch India will face will cause Indian companies as well as its customers to look at other locations for their operations. They feel that this is an opportunity that other countries could grab. Incidentally, 75% of the respondents of the DiamondCluster survey are currently o utsourcing to India. more...

Indian data breach hits HSBC

2006-06-28T17:16:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-21T00:19:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-19T00:09:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-06T00:25:00.000-07:00

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...

Opinion: Why I don't trust offshore customer service

2006-05-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

Silicon.com
How comfortable are you with giving your personal details to call centre staff in foreign countries? Simon Moores doesn't like it one bit. Something hasn't been quite right with the Barclays online banking site this week. As I write this column, I'll 'ping' it one more time to be sure - and the result is a 'no response from server' message, so all is not well in the wonderful world of online finance. Being curious as to the cause and wanting to know if a client payment had made its way by Bacs into my business account, I decided to call the Barclays helpline. This was answered by a pleasant young woman with an Indian accent, who requested my online account information. more...

Tech predictions for 2010

2006-05-19T01:02:00.000-07:00

Economic Times
Techies who want to lead businesses will find it easier to climb up the ladder of corporate success in 2010. According to a study by management consultants Deloitte, called "Eye to the Future — How Technology, Media and Telecommunications Advances Could Change the Way We Live in 2010", technology will become really important in a few years. The report outlines how technology will affect our everyday lives by 2010. The growing ubiquity of technology will have a number of impacts on our everyday lives. Here, according to Deloitte, is how your daily life will be affected by 2010: Techie rules the roost By 2010 technical skills will be more sought after than ever, according to the study. Tech professionals will find it easier to climb the corporate ladder by the end of the decade. Those with a greater degree of technological literacy may find themselves moving up the corporate hierarchy more quickly than those without. more...

Why do IT projects fail?

2006-05-14T19:35:00.000-07:00

Economictimes.com
Sagarika Gupta, a project manager in a leading IT company, was thrilled when she got a large software project. She had the best people in the team. And she was promised bonuses if the project went well. But unfortunately clients rejected it. Her boss assumed that she had not put best efforts in the project, although she knew she had. It was a failure - and worse, she had no assurance that she would do any better on the next project. If this scenario sounds familiar, you're not alone. Repeated studies have shown that the failure rate for IT projects is more than 50 per cent. This is tolerated only because software is vital to the running of modern organisations. Today three out of four projects are still failing. Why, though, do these failures occur? And why project managers (PM) are held responsible to it? How can corporate India deal with project mismanagement? One would claim that every project that fails is the result of poor management. A poorly funded or ill-conceived project will fail regardless of the skills of the project manager or project team. Projects that lack buy-in from top management are doomed, as are projects that lack ties with company objectives or that have no clear return on investment. Sometimes a shift in business priorities requires that certain projects be abandoned. But project mismanagement plays a significant role in many project failures. more...

Know how much Infy top earner makes?

2006-05-08T21:50:00.000-07:00

EconomicTimes.com
S D Shibulal, the US-based founder-director and promoter of Infosys, leads the pack among the company directors in terms of pay-packets with an annual salary of $1.6 lakh (Rs 71 lakh at an exchange rate of Rs 44.9), according to the filings made by Infosys with the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). Among other directors, it is the former CFO and incumbent HR head, TV Mohandas Pai who ranks as the second highest paid director with a pay packet of $41,815 (Rs 18.78 lakh) in FY06. He even tops the other directors in terms of bonus/incentive payout in FY06 which stood at $1 lakh or Rs 45.6 lakh. The other four directors including Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani drew a salary of $29,355 (Rs 13.2 lakh per annum) during FY06. Both the chief mentor and the MD of the company received a similar bonus payout of $ 45,925. Incumbent chief financial officer of the company, V Balakrishnan, drew a salary of $29,946 with $64,762 as bonus/incentive in FY06. Infosys, which launched Infosys Consulting in April ’04, has invested $7m in FY06 in this arm, taking the total investment to $17m. more...

UK firms to drive offshore outsourcing boom

2006-04-25T21:22:00.000-07:00

Silicon.com
Demand for offshore outsourcing services among UK and European companies is set to increase by 50 per cent per year over the next two years, according to Gartner. Globally the analyst predicts the number of organisations doing offshore outsourcing will increase from 13 per cent to 20 per cent over the same period. In the next decade China will move from manufacturing to services. But being able to speak English is one thing. Being able to think it is another.
Ian Marriott, research VP at Gartner, said: "We are seeing increasing uptake in offshore services in the UK and Europe both with traditional providers and Indian providers. It's not an add-on anymore. Deploy those resources wherever they can be found." India remains the first choice of offshore destination for European countries and China also features as a potential top three choice, although it is still hampered by a lack of English language skills and a focus on the US. more...

Wanna be a software testing expert?

2006-04-25T02:28:00.000-07:00

Economic Times
Software Testing, also referred to as software quality assurance, has come up as a rewarding career in the computing industry. Companies need people to write software programmes, also called applications, but they also need professionals to discover defects in these applications, before the customer does. And it's here that the need for software testers is felt. While simply defining software testing, Sunil Bellara, Associate Director, Recruitment and Staffing, Capgemini , said: “It’s a process used to identify the correctness , completeness and quality of developed computer software. Testing involves operation of a system or application under controlled conditions and evaluating the results.” Pankaj Agarwal, CEO, Sopra Group, India, added, “There are many approaches to software testing, but effective testing of complex products is essentially a process of investigation , not merely a matter of creating and following rote procedure.” more...