Outsourcing

Offshoring business in India is getting bigger not by the day, but the hour. Consultancy and offshoring company Accenture on Wednesday announced India as most active developing market, playing a key role in its global delivery model and network.
The expansion had been so rapid that the company doubled the size of their workforce to 11,000 in the past year said Mr Joe W Forehand, chairman of Accenture, who is on a visit to India.
The company’s Indian employees today constitute 10% of the 1,06,000 workforce worldwide and “we might move in internal functions to India, like HR, knowledge management capabilities and financials.
We continue to see demand and will leverage the talented people here to expand our operations,” he added.
He said the BPO operations have risen in the past few years along with the rise of headcount in the segment. “BPO gives great opportunity for vertical expansion as it is fast expanding sector.”
Accenture has its delivery centres in various countries. Apart from India, which is the most aggressively growing, centres in the Philippines and China are growing rapidly. “Though the growth there is not as aggressive as India,” said Mr Forehand.
He said, “The areas where we enter for making deals we get only 2% competition and we bag around 87% of them. These deals are SAP and Oracle-based solutions and are between $1million and $25 million in size.”
Last year revenues of the company were $13.7 billion out of which 35% was contributed by outsourcing and the remaining by consultancy. According to Mr Stephen Rohlder, COO of Accenture, “The growth in Apac region was 11%, whereas in the US it was 23% in the first quarter this year, but the main growth came from Japan and Australia.

News Source : The Economic Times

India's outsource industry poised to grow in 2005

by Staff Correspondent on December 31, 2004 03:57AM (EST)
India's fledging outsourcing industry is poised to grow by 40 percent in year 2005 as the country's information technology industry continues to impress the world with its low-cost, high quality service.
According to a study by India's software industry, outsourcing will continue to grow and will bring in $20 billion in revenue in the coming three years.
India's offshore companies survived a major scare. They feared that if elected, John Kerry would have pulled the plug on outsourcing. But with Bush's reelection, India's outsourcing industry looks secure, at least for another four years.
A study by the AMR research says that up to 15 percent of IT jobs required by U.S-based companies will be performed in India by 2010, helping the U.S economy to create investments worth $30 billion per year.
The study said the cost savings from offshore outsourcing would create an additional $30 billion per year in new investments for U.S companies. By then, the Indian IT labor force will be larger than 3 million, and half of the workers will be performing jobs for U.S companies.
India Inc. is delivering high-value, low-cost services. While Indian providers struggle to understand all the intricacies of the U.S. and European markets, a focus on process, quality, and low cost will make them hard to beat in the long term.
Reference: http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041220-121530-2354r.htm

Unisys to invest $180 mn in India operations

by Staff Correspondent on March 29, 2005 01:40AM (EST)
Unisys Corporation, the US-based global IT services and solutions firm, plans to invest $180 million (Rs. 810 million) to expand its operations in India, including its headcount, over the next five years.
The expansion plans include the setting up of another development centre in India, which will be in addition to the existing global services centre in Bangalore, with 150 software professionals currently.
The $6-billion technology firm also has long-term partnerships with Cartior, Hexaware, NIIT and Tata Infotech for outsourcing its IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) services.
The four partners have collectively 500 people dedicated to Unisys projects across the verticals, including banking and financial services, transportation (airlines), government and public sector and media.
The four partners have collectively 500 people dedicated to Unisys projects across the verticals, including banking and financial services, transportation (airlines), government and public sector and media.
News Source: http://www.hindustantimes.com/

Outsourcing and its causes

Outsourcing is getting the work done from other country due to various advantages. The outsourcing can not only be of software or done by only BPO’s as largely known today, but also in various other businesses. The various causes that has lead to increasing trend toward outsourcing has been due to the following reasons:
· Wages
· Communication
· Transportation
The most prominent among them being getting work done at a low cost and from specialized personnel. This has also lead to Brain Drain, which does not focus on just the IT phenomenon, though it continues to be one of the more prominent examples because of recent media coverage of outsourcing. Thousands of kilometers of fiber optic cable and high bandwidth connections laid during the boom years have united much of the world in high-speed connectivity. Relentless growth in storage capacity and high-speed transmission (digital scanning is currently at 200 pages a minute) has meant that anything can be digitized and sent anywhere for processing.
The main disadvantage of outsourcing has been the loss of the jobs of the people in their own country. The labor class is worried more often than corporate executives, who run the risk of losing their jobs as a result of this global shift of products and services.

OUTSOURCING

Outsourcing is the relationship that enables us to gain maximum benefits and helps to provide customer satisfaction worldwide. Outsourcing is the cost effective means of gaining the profitability and increasing the resources. Successful outsourcing relationships needs to be managed and must have the clear understanding of what various deficiencies are and how they can be managed.

In a modern targeted business environment, companies need to maintain core competition so as to minimize their costs and increase the customer relations worldwide. The Indian software industry currently leads the offshore software outsourcing market across the globe. Outsourcing from India is basically because of its highly improvement in its technical education, programming virtually in any area and preferably cost advantages.

Global Software Outsourcing (GSO), also sometimes called as Offshore Software Outsourcing, is the outsourcing of software development to contractors outside the client company's home country. Clients mainly focus on the global outsourcing to have the improved and faster access to the IT market, in addition to the cost savings. GSO is expanding rapidly as in Ireland, China, Russia and Chile with India the main.

To able to grow in the highly competitive environment, the business needs to be of good in quality with the promptness. In order to provide software development outsourcing, one should focus on the various points -
1) Needs of the clients with respect to software quality, accuracy and safety must be fulfilled.
2) Making the client confident that the software quality standards are met continuously during the development process.
3) Ensure confidence regarding software quality management.
Risks may also arise in the software outsourcing because of the misunderstandings and misconceptions between the client and the developer.

How India Became a Global Force

by Staff Correspondent on January 31, 2005 04:44AM (EST)
According to a study conducted for the World Bank Institute in Washington, D.C., by Evalueserve, a business intelligence and research firm Indian professionals, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs of Indian origin helped promote India as an outsourcing destination,. The subcontinent will retain its edge because of the growing influence and expertise of the Indian diaspora, particularly in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, the study concluded. A key factor in favor of India is the increase in organized networking and mentoring that the members of the diaspora community can provide to businesses engaged in outsourcing, according to the study. By the 1990s, many Indian engineers, who started moving to the United States in the 1960s, had either become entrepreneurs, venture capitalists or senior executives in large and midsize companies, according to the study. Many of these professionals started their own firms in India, while others persuaded their companies to hire Indian IT professionals. This provided more visibility to the Indian talent pool and resulted in the strengthening of the diaspora.

Some venture capitalists in the United States, particularly those of Indian origin, are funding companies that have back-end operations in India to save on R&D costs, the study found. As of March, more than 150 U.S.-based startups had some back-end operations in India; by March 2006, the study estimated that this number will likely double.

Reference: http://www.cio.com/archive/120104/tl_india.html

Russia an emerging partner in Strategic Offshore IT Outsourcing

by Staff Correspondent on December 31, 2004 04:08AM (EST)
Read about "Russian capabilities in meeting the growing demand in Offshore Outsourcing"
and see a report on
1. "Global IT Outsourcing Market"
2. "Offshore Outsourcing Market Penetration By Geography"
3. "Top 10 ICT spending nations"
4."European Offshore Outsourcing Market"
and many more importnat facts about "Offshore IT Outsourcing " here:
http://www.auriga.com/company/ICT_Symposium_2002.pdf