The Hindu Business Line : Looking to give that edge

IBM Daksh is leveraging the expertise of its parent, to give Daksh's outsourcing business that edge, says Pawan Vaish, CEO, IBM Daksh. Excerpts from a chat with eWorld:

With business transformation outsourcing the buzzword among major BPO players, how is Daksh leveraging IBM's platform to offer value-added services?

IBM has been one of the largest knowledge services companies. About 50 per cent of our revenues comes from the services business. IBM's transformation started when it began work from a pure-play hardware company to a hardware technology-services provider. The next phase of transformation at IBM began from IT services to business services, wherein it offers services such as customer relationship management, finance and accounting, supply chain management and procurement processes.

So when customers ask for transforming their business, that is where our real skills lie — IBM with the blend of its technology platform, global consulting services business, domain knowledge and BPO services is able to offer customers what is called business transformation outsourcing.

IBM is also using its global delivery capabilities for this business. Since IBM has presence across the globe, we can leverage this platform for providing our offshore services from anywhere without necessarily having a delivery centre in that region.

Apart from having advantage in client services, Daksh is able to utilise IBM's strong technology support for its business. We also work very closely with IBM Research Labs to leverage the company's innovations and intellectual property. IBM invests $5 billion annually towards research and development. And we are leveraging this technology to create our services portfolio.

What this does is add enormous business value for our customers. The area of analytics, speech recognition, routing of cabs, etc, are some examples of innovation carried out at IBM Research Labs that are being used at Daksh. We have already deployed the speech recognition technology to recruit at some of our centres. And we are in the rollout phase of digitalising the whole process across all the centres.

What are your strategies for employee retention and how are they different from other companies?

Investing significantly in training, offering MBA programmes at subsidised costs. The dream of being an employee at IBM is to be able to globalise your career. With IBM operating across different segments, the employees who join at Daksh have the flexibility to move across divisions. So we have had employees who move from IBM Daksh to IBM Research Labs to our Global Technology Services Division. And this happens at mid as well as senior level. We encourage high performers to move across business units every two-three years and this prevents stagnation in their careers.

Are you currently looking at deals such as the business transformation deal you had with Bharti? Do you expect more such deals in the near future?

The answer is always yes. Bharti was a landmark engagement for IBM worth almost worth $700-$750 million. It was a rare co-sourcing arrangement. We are linked directly to the success of Bharti. We get paid a portion of their revenues on the IT infrastructure side.

We do see potential for similar deals in the domestic market and look forward to such deals. We have seen a mixed interest from our clients. Typically, such co-sourcing arrangements are preferable for large clients who prefer to put all their eggs in one basket. But for mid-sized companies, we haven't seen any material shift happening. These companies prefer the conventional partner arrangement.

priyanka@thehindu.co.in

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