For the $13.5-billion French IT major Capgemini, India is the nerve centre for its global business process outsourcing (BPO) operations.

Nearly half of its 13,500 global BPO employees are employed in India. It is expanding its India operations by moving to tier-II cities such as Salem and Tiruchi in Tamil Nadu. Having made India as a major delivery centre, the company is targeting more business from India.

Hubert Giraud, CEO of Capgemini Global BPO, and B.L. Narayan, Head of India operations, were in Tiruchi last week to launch the new centre. They spoke to Business Line on the BPO industry and the company’s India strategy. Excerpts:

As part of your expansion in India, are you moving work from other countries or are you adding jobs here?

Narayan: We see growth across all of our global centres. It is not that India is growing and jobs are moving from all other centres here. Many centres like Guatemala and Brazil are growing rapidly. We have opened a new centre in Brazil and innovating the delivery network in a way that it remains relevant, remains competitive and we are tapping the right skills and assets from those regions.

What is your strategy to tap business out of India?

Giraud: Eight years ago, we started in India, IT and BPO services. The idea was India will be the base to deliver services to the rest of the world. Nobody was looking at India-for-India. Not in IT or in BPO. And then we did the deal with Hindustan Unilever, and bought the Indian accounting front of HUL. That was the start of it. We have now developed some contacts to deliver BPO services. I think Indian corporations were more interested in rapid developments abroad than locally. But, I suppose that with a more difficult economic environment, they will have a closer look at their India operations. They could find that they are not very efficient, and will be better for them to use specialist providers like us. It is not their business to develop accounting technology or accounting processes. We do that. And I believe even for an Indian company, we could have a good answer for them.

Narayan: This could go a little bit ahead of accounting as well, in areas of supply chain management, where we believe it will be a lot more relevant in Indian market compared to the core accounting services.

Any India specific strategy?

Narayan: We are looking at combining BPO along with technology. We are quite large in the technology space in India. There is a bigger initiative called Local Business Services that looks at the Indian market. We made inroads into government, corporations, public sector and private sector companies in technology and allied consulting. We are now progressing into BPO. That is a gradual movement that we are looking at. We may combine some of our efforts in this market and holistically look at it. So, BPO is not a piecemeal solution, but integrated solutions that we look at. That will then be relevant to the Indian market, instead of standalone. We have around 80 clients in India.

How many are for BPO services?

Narayan: Out of this 80, only handfuls are BPO services. But we never looked at the market from a BPO context, to go and address. We were looking at the global clients' Indian subsidiary. Now that we have got a channel, a go-to market, we may try to integrate.

raja.simhan@thehindu.co.in

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