Saturday, October 27, 2007

BPO industry to localize globally


Source: offshoringtimes.com

Call it reverse outsourcing or localising globally, varied accents and foreign faces are fast becoming the norm at Indian BPOs abroad.With wages on a rise companies like Wipro are saying it is absolutely essential to have centres outside India.Wipro has just established a centre in Atlanta with 500 people and says that going ahead 30 per cent of its entire workforce will be global. It plans to open 5 to 6 centres in places like the Philippines, Mexico, Shanghai and Berlin in the next two years.

We have one centre in north, multiple centres in Europe, one in the Fareast and probably one centre in China, said TK Kurien, Head, BPO Business, Wipro.

Wipro has just established a centre in Atlanta with 500 people and says that going ahead 30 per cent of its entire workforce will be global. It plans to open 5 to 6 centres in places like the Philippines, Mexico, Shanghai and Berlin in the next two years.

Infosys, which runs a global internship program called Instep has about five per cent of global workforce and says that will increase.

Primarily because we are doing more consulting type work and would like to have more local people for consulting relationship management and we would like to hire more for client facing activities, said Gopalakrishnan, CEO, Infosys.

Europe is becoming the next growth market for companies, Wipro anticipates that 40 per cent of its entire revenues going ahead will come from this region.

With Germany alone contributing 20 per cent of that, localising helps companies win over local governments thereby ensuring they get more complex and sensitive work which bill higher.