Bpo – Bane or Boon Essay Example

potential for law firms and entrepreneurs. Its market research services are aimed at top-rung financial service firms, to which it provides analysis of investment opportunities and business plans. Another major offering is multilingual services. Evalueserve trains and qualifies employees to communicate in Chinese, Spanish, German, Japanese and Italian, among other languages. That skill set has opened market opportunities in Europe and elsewhere, especially with global corporations.

ICICI InfoTech Services in Edison, New Jersey, is another BPO services provider that is offering marketing software products and diversifying into markets outside the US. The firm has been promoted by $2-billion ICICI Bank, a large financial institution in Mumbai that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In its first year after setting up shop in March 1999, ICICI InfoTech spent $33 million acquiring two information technology services firms in New Jersy – Objects Experts and lvory Consulting – and Command Systems in Connecticut.

These acquisitions were to help ICICI InfoTech hit the ground in the US with a ready book of contracts. But it soon found US companies increasingly outsourcing their requirements to offshore locations, instead of hiring foreign employees to work onsite at their offices. The company found other native modes for growth. It has started marketing its products in banking, insurance and enterprises resource planning among others. It has earmarked $10 million for its next US market offensive, which would go towards R & D and back-end infrastructure support, and creating new versions of its products to comply with US market requirements.

It also has a joint venture-Semantik Solutions GmbH in Berlin, Germany with the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering, which is

based in Berlin and Dortmund, Germany. Fraunhofer is a leading with 200 experts in software engineering and evolutionary information. A relatively late entrant to the US market, ICICI InfoTech started out with plain vanilla IT services, including operating call centers. As the market for traditional IT services started weakening around mid-2000, ICICI InfoTech repositioned itself as a ``Solutions’’ firm offering both products and services.

Today, it offers bundled packages of products and insurance, among other areas. The new offerings include data center and disaster recovery management and value chain management services. ICICI InfoTech’s expansion into new overseas markets ahs paid off. Its $50 million revenue for its latest financial year ending March 2003 has the US operations generating some $9 million. It now boasts more than 700 customers in 30 countries, including Dow Jones, Glaxo-Smithkline, Panasonic and American Insurance Group. The outsourcing industry is indeed growing from strength.

Though technical support and financial services have dominated India’s outsourcing industry, newer fields are emerging which are expected to boost the industry many times over. Outsourcing of human resource services or HR BPO is emerging as big opportunity for Indian BPOs with global market in this segment estimated at $40-60 billion per annum. HR BPO comes to about 33 percent of the outsourcing revenue and India has immense potential as more than 80 percent of Fortune 1000 companies discuss offshore BPO as a way to cut costs and increase productivity.