Upstarts Threaten Big Players in Potential LatAm BPO Boom
February 6th, 2012
Santiago: Sustained vertical drive.
By Dan Berthiaume
Latin American nations make up about one-quarter of the 2012 list of Top 100 outsourcing locations compiled by global outsourcing research/advisory firm Tholons, and that is no accident. As Manuel Ravago, president for research at Tholons, explains, Latin America is an up-and-comer in the world of BPO. And more agile smaller countries might make the most of that.
India-Centric Management Consulting Does Not Meet Goals
January 20th, 2012By Stephanie Moore
When Forrester published its first Indian vendor consulting Wave in 2005, Indian vendors were just starting their journey into management consulting. At the time, none of these vendors could compete with traditional management consultants – such as Accenture and Deloitte – from a scale, brand, or experience perspective. Given the rapid growth that these vendors achieved in the pure IT services space, however, it seemed only a matter of time before they would challenge vendors such as Accenture in the IT management consulting arena. Six years have gone by and these ambitious Indian IT service providers are still trailing the traditional management consultants.
Nearshore Needs More Training, Greater Scale
January 11th, 2012By Patrick Haller
Shanker: India has a better grasp of "the training concept."
The prospect of managing multiple locations in the US, India, Mexico and Japan can be daunting for many people. But Ravi Shanker, Sales Director for HCL America, Inc., has been doing it for years. His experience overseeing IT development projects began with Polaris Software in the early 2000s, then with HCL. As an insider, he has been directly involved in a market that has shifted from Indian-centric software development to new destinations like Brazil and Mexico. We asked Shanker about the current state of outsourcing, the trend toward onshoring, and what countries need to do to remain relevant or become more competitive.
Cognizant Claims to Be India’s Number Three IT Company
August 3rd, 2011CHENNAI — Cognizant announced that its revenue rose 34.4% to $1.49 billion in the quarter ended June, and in the process displaced Wipro Technologies as India’s No. 3 IT firm in terms of revenue. Wipro reported a revenue of $1.41 billion in the quarter.
Cognizant said it is expecting a revenue of $1.57 billion in the September quarter. Wipro’s guidance for the quarter lies in the range of $1.39-1 .42 billion. Cognizant has also narrowed the revenue gap with Infosys to less than $200 million. Infosys earned $1.671 billion in June quarter, and its guidance is $1.73 billion for September quarter.
Cognizant’s net profit jumped 20.83% to $208.04 million in the April-June 2011 quarter, up from $172.17 million in the year-ago period.
The NASDAQ-listed firm, which has more than 70% of its software developers in India, has also been aggressive on the recruitment front. In the June …
Wipro’s Growth Lags Behind Competitors Despite Offshoring Boom
July 20th, 2011Wipro’s second-quarter revenue grew, the company reported Wednesday. However, its larger competitors, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, grew faster.
IT services revenue at Wipro totalled US$1.4 billion for the quarter, up 17 percent from a year earlier. Wipro was expected to underperform in the quarter, despite a boom in the offshore outsourcing market, said Amneet Singh, vice president for global sourcing at research firm Everest Group.
The impact of a management and business reorganization at the company in January may be felt only later in the year, he said. Wipro appointed a single CEO in January, abandoning its previous dual-CEO structure, and announced a greater focus on key industry segments such as healthcare.
The company is seeing early signs of positive momentum after the re-organization, it said.
Wipro may also have been hurt by lackluster growth in demand from the media and telecom sector which accounted for about 17 …
By Patrick Haller
It is not a new phenomenon, but one that has been gaining strength over past five years; companies from the US and the UK are pulling stakes and moving their operations home from India. With a perfect storm of inflation, wage increases, bad customer service, accented English and rising unemployment at home the once cost-effective market is no longer the attractive offshoring destination it once was.
Wipro, Cognizant Spending Big Sums of Money Lobbying in U.S.
July 8th, 2011BANGALORE — Lobbying has been a taboo for India’s wildly successful software companies: that distasteful activity was supposed to be the preserve of those looking to prosper from the licence permit raj. And anyway, their markets were mostly overseas.
But now, in the home of free market capitalism, as their encounters with disguised protectionism grow more frequent, the ‘L’ word does not appear so dirty any more. That is why, while America keeps inventing reasons to make it harder for them to do business, many Indian software companies are spending large sums hiring professional help to win friends and influence people in their biggest market.
At stake is over $30 billion (Rs 1.3 lakh crore) in business every year, about half of India’s total outsourcing revenue. Among the companies mounting an aggressive PR effort is Wipro, India’s third-largest software exporter. Last year, it hired Melanie Carter-Maguire, a …
Reeling under debt and other macro concerns, the world economy is going through turbulent times. However, this is something to cheer up the Indian IT industry. In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Vineet Nayar, Vice Chairman and CEO of HCL Technologies said that bad macro-economic condition in developed world is good for the Indian IT industry.
Confident to stay afloat in a tumbling economy, HCL Technologies is seeing robust demand the US and Europe. Nayar reasoned that the customers have realised that economy will remain weak and in such a condition outsourcing goes up. He said that local vendors have lost market share to global players and this will see churn of deals within existing vendors.
Going ahead, the company is aiming to hike market share with investments and innovation, without sacrificing margins.
Below is the verbatim transcript of his interview with Udayan Mukherjee of CNBC-TV18.
Q: How is the demand backdrop …
Walk around the Bangalore and Mysore campuses of Indian IT outsourcing giant Infosys and it’s easy to become despondent about Britain’s competitive future.
It’s not the grand replicas of the White House, the pyramids and Sydney Opera House so much as the numbers that tell the story.
Infosys adds 20,000 Indian IT and engineering graduates to its 150,000-strong workforce each year, paying salaries of just £5,000 and training them, 200 at a time, in huge auditoria.
It’s nearly all aimed at the West with Infosys, India’s fifth largest company, getting 90pc of its $6bn (£3.74bn) turnover from the US and Europe.
Britain accounts for 12pc – about $720m a year. No wonder the Bangalore campus was a key stop on David Cameron’s India tour last year.
Infosys is a household name in India, with a market capitalisation of $35bn in Mumbai and on Nasdaq. Last week it was the top-rated business …
KOLKATA, India — The Central American republic of El Salvador is keen on trade and investments from India and stronger bilateral relations between the two countries.
Speaking at an interactive session fielded by the Indian Chamber of Commerce in Kolkata on Wednesday, the ambassador of El Salvador to India, Dr Ruben Ignacio Zamora Rivas said that the nation can open up the vast markets in Guatemela, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, besides being an ideal hub for access to the US and European markets.
Dr Rivas said that currently India exports pharmateuticals, fabrics, textiles, electrical goods and auto parts to El Salvador, but there is ample scope for trade in the areas of IT, agro-chemicals, BPOs and medical services from India. He said advanced countries of the world have realized that the future of global trade and commerce lies in China and India, and given proper importance, …
