The Hindu Business Line : BPO vendors seek to expand offerings

Signs of revival
Some firms like Wipro BPO are adding newer processes to their service offerings
Hinduja Global sees good demand in areas like customer relationship management from across verticals
Kale Consultants plans to add more platforms

Indian BPO firms are relatively less affected than their IT counterparts in the current downturn.

Vishwanath Kulkarni
Shamik Paul

Bangalore, June 15 Business process outsourcing (BPO) firms are seeking to expand their service offerings to cater to the incremental growth as existing customers look to outsource more to reduce costs.

While some firms like Wipro BPO are adding newer processes to their service offerings on their own, others such as Hinduja Global Solutions are partnering with IT firms for the same.

“Customers are looking at increasing the scope of work. They have started looking at outsourcing more processes,” said Mr Ashutosh Vaidya, head of Wipro BPO that is adding more processes to cater to the growing customer needs.

As sales cycles stay elongated, BPO vendors expect growth to come from existing customers. Even smaller firms such as Caliber Point, the BPO subsidiary of Hexaware Technologies, are seeing more work from their existing customers.

Newer solutions

“About 30 per cent of our customers are seeking to do more work with us,” said Mr R. U. Shrinivas, CEO, Caliber Point, which expects to leverage the expertise of its parent Hexaware to build newer solutions and processes.

The independent BPO firms are, however, looking at partnering with IT vendors to launch newer solutions. “It does not make sense for us to develop solutions on our own as they are capital-intensive and the returns on investments are not sure,” said Mr Partha De Sarkar, CEO, Hinduja Global Solutions, while stating that his firm has partnered with software vendors, systems integrators and hardware companies.

Hinduja Global is bidding as a consortium for projects and sees good demand in areas such as customer relationship management from across verticals for which it has partnered with Talisma and AstuteSolutions.

More platforms

Kale Consultants, which mainly offers platform-based back-office services in areas such as billing, ticket sales audit, revenue accounting among others, plans to add more platforms in areas that are adjacent to its current offerings.

“Some of our customers are using one or two of our platforms. There is interest from them to use the other platforms,” said Mr Vipul Jain, CEO of Kale Consultants. “There is lot more traction now as people are willing to outsource more while looking at value proposition more strongly,” Mr Jain added.

Indian BPO firms are relatively less affected than their IT counterparts in the current downturn. According to National Association of Software and Services Companies, the Indian BPO industry is expected to grow at about 15 per cent in the current year, marginally ahead of the IT services industry.