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Sumeet Kaul

Publishing houses and content developers worldwide are taking a leaf from the book of outsourcing - and sending work to Indian shores.

AMIDST all the attention focused on call centres, some Indian companies are steadily making their presence felt in the publishing outsourcing and e-learning domain.

Publication houses, educational institutes and content developers in the US and other English-speaking countries are increasingly looking at India as an attractive destination to outsource various parts of their work — from pre-press to proofreading, from template designing to text composition.

Publishing outsourcing includes diverse services such as editorial work, page-making, typesetting, digitalisation of content and warehousing. The work rates charged by companies are either on a per-hour or a per-page basis, depending on the service offered, and the type of business model. The rates can range from $7 to $18 per hour or $7 to $22 per page.

"The idea is to save 40 to 50 per cent of the cost for foreign clients," says Jayraj, India Manager, Publishing Offshoring, Aquent.

Charging on a per-page basis is more common, says Lalit Kanodia, Chairman, Datamatics Technologies.

Ranjit Singh, President and CEO, TechBooks, says his company, founded in 1988, provides composition and data conversion services and solutions across multiple media to businesses. These include publishers, information aggregators, professional societies, government agencies, universities and corporations.

"Our offerings include cross-media composition (including print, Internet and wireless), data conversion and content outsourcing services and solutions to content-rich businesses," he says. The company's clients include Cambridge University Press, Blackwell, Hall, Pearson and Tata McGraw Hill.

Work may be outsourced to offshore captive units or third-party units. In the offshore captive model, big publishing houses set up a wholly-owned subsidiary in the country and the majority of services are done in-house.

However, it is possible that some services, such as conversion of content into digital form or certain editorial work, may be outsourced.

In the third-party outsourced model, most of the work being done is for other publishing houses.

The publishing outsourcing work being done in the country is often time-bound and process-specific. "Transaction-based outsourcing work is more common than end-to-end operations," says Ravindra S. Datar, Principal Analyst-IT Services (India) and BPO (Asia-Pacific), Gartner.

This means some specialised services may be outsourced to other firms, and the BPO (business process outsourcing) unit focuses on certain niche areas. But the cash cow lies under a single roof for various services, and the future could see that happening.

Datar, who has been tracking the BPO scene in India, believes that publishing outsourcing is still at a nascent stage. But industry insiders agree that the sector will see a lot of growth in the next two to three years.

For Hurix, an e-publishing and content development firm with branches in Mumbai and Chennai, publishing constitutes about 35 per cent of its business.

T.S. Sethumadhavan, Practice Area Head-Hurix Publishing, who operates from the company's Chennai centre, explains that typically a raw manuscript is made into a print-ready format, which then has the option of being converted into a CD, print format, or as online content, as per the client's requirement.

The `Content Management' wing of Mumbai-based ITES and BPO provider Datamatics Technologies has four major publishing houses as its clients. "We specialise in scientific work, which is more complex," says Kanodia. The company provides a range of services under one roof, including data enrichment, editorial services, and content-delivery services.

TechBooks has recorded around 25-30 per cent growth in 2004, leading to revenues of nearly $50 million. Ranjit Singh expects another booming year for the publishing industry. "We expect to grow by at least 25-30 per cent this year," he says. Worldwide, the publishing outsourcing market is expected to grow to about $4.5 billion by early 2007 from the current $2.6 billion.

The company, one of the bigger publishing outsourcing companies, currently has about 2,300 employees in India. "We hire across various verticals. We hire programmers and people proficient in languages like Quark and XML. We also hire a lot of middle management people from the manufacturing vertical for the kind of professionalism and efficiency they bring to our processes," he says.

"TechBooks teams seasoned project managers in the US with skilled professionals in India to prepare content for large projects."

Aquent, a global staffing and outsourcing firm, is also eyeing a piece of the publishing outsourcing pie. "Publishing is a value-added service we offer to our clients globally out of our Mumbai facility as part of our Solutions Services," says Kimberly Schaffer, Vice-President, Offshore Publications, Aquent.

The company's Mumbai centre focuses on scientific and medical work.

So, what makes India tick as an outsourcing destination? Price is an important factor.

"India can be extremely competitive in pricing, as against countries in the Asia-Pacific region," says Kimberly.

The time zone difference between India and the US is another advantage in projects where the work is of a 24-hour cycle basis.

But it is the abundance of an English-speaking, educated population that makes the country attractive, in the long run.

"We very quickly migrate to specialist know-how, and go beyond cost advantage," says Kanodia. "Our employees include engineers and chartered accountants."

"The cost of operations and availability is the key, and India has good writers and translators," says Datar.

Picture by Sampath Kumar G.P.

sumeetkaul@thehindu.co.in

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