Layoffs: Techies turn to trade union

NEW DELHI: The software industry is willing to talk to the sector's trade union on layoffs and other work-related issues, a top official of the
industry's representative body said.

"If you want to talk to me why should I refuse simply because the colour of your shirt is red or green or whatever," Raju Bhatnagar, vice president for business process outsourcing (BPO) and government relations at the National Association of Software Companies (Nasscom) told IANS.

Nasscom will be meeting the Union for Information and Technology-enabled Services (Unites) has enlisted the help of the Switzerland-based Union Network International (UNI).

"Yes, we will be meeting union officials but date is not confirmed," Bhatnagar said.

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Citibank to beef up BPO subsidiary in RP

MANILA, Philippines--Financial services firm Citibank says it is ramping up its business process outsourcing (BPO) operations in the country in response to demand for customer support services worldwide.

Established in 2004, Citigroup Business Process Solutions (or Citigroup BPS) is a subsidiary of Singapore-based Citibank Overseas Investment Corp.

The Philippine subsidiary provides support services to Citibank's overseas operations including consumer banking and wealth management segments.

Citigroup BPS currently employs around 1,200 workers. The company announced a partnership with training school Excel Asia to provide agent-staffing services starting last January.

The company did not disclose specific numbers on how much workers it will need to add, noting that demand varies depending on client projects that come up different parts of the year.

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BPO, offshoring may be obsolete words by 2015

Words like business process outsourcing (BPO) and offshoring may not exist in the IT dictionary by 2015. Substitutes like business service outsourcing and global delivery model (GDM), necessitated by the changing business model of IT firms, are likely to replace them over the next seven years.

"In five to ten years, you will see a dramatic change in the way people are serviced. Who will care from which location they are being serviced? A large number of processes will get globalised. There will be more automation. Companies will reinvent themselves every six months, and IT will be further embedded in their processes. The BPO sector, too, will be providing end-to-end business services. In fact, there may be no such word like BPO or offshoring," asserts Nasscom President Som Mittal.

Sudin Apte, senior analyst with Forrester Research, concurs and predicts there will be two types of players by 2015. "You will have five or six large players with multiple lines of services across low-cost delivery centres," he says.

These players will comprise both Indian players like Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys and multinationals like IBM and Accenture. These firms will have thousands of workers in different geographies, and be servicing many industry verticals. Forrester referred to them as Billion-Dollar Babies 18 months ago.

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Where is BPO in Asia-Pacific?

Do you see lots of BPO happening in the Asia-Pacific region? Before we answer that, what do I mean by BPO?

I mean business process outsourcing, which therefore excludes captive centers and considers only the engagement of third-parties to provide business processing services, excluding IT-related services such as infrastructure and applications. In addition, we need a threshold level to consider, and for that I've used a total contract value (TCV) of US$25 million as the threshold.

If we look at this BPO market from a global perspective, we see that the main business process areas are HR-related, facilities management-related and financial services-related (not finance and accounting, but rather, specific financial services such as loans processing).

However, in the Asia-Pacific region, BPO in these areas is relatively non-existent and CRM-related BPO is the only significant contributing domain. What's intriguing is why would that be the case?

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Banking Services: Providing IT and BPO Services to Banks

Banks continue to use technology intensively to trim costs and increase revenues. Apart from economic conditions, regulatory issues, competitive pressures and changing customer needs that have contributed to the changes of the sector, technology has truly revolutionized the industry. In today's competitive scenario, banks can still improve their performance and bottom lines by carefully allocating technology funds for measurable returns on investment.

Hexaware focuses on providing IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) services to banks across the world. Explore Hexaware's key projects and features as well as market trends that have translated into large outsourcing engagements, including the restructuring of core leasing applications as well as the development and support of mission critical systems.

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