India's status as a dominant IT outsourcing destination is under attack from China. In the next 10 years, China would replace India as the number 1 technology outsourcing country, said the recent Global Outsourcing Report carried out by the Geneva-based strategic advisory firm Horasis and Going Global Ventures.
The silver lining for India, according to the report, is that it will remain the most popular and the most competitive outsourcing destination in 2005 and will remain on the list of the best five outsourcing countries in the world till 2015 alongside China, US, Brazil and Russia. At present, China, Costa Rica, Hungary, and Czech Republic are rated just below India.
India's IT outsourcing exports have registered a 27 per cent growth in 2003-04 to reach $2.5 billion and the revenues from the IT enabled services are likely to touch $3.6 billion. Nasscom and the IT research firm, Gartner, estimate that India's earnings from the ITES will go up to $20 billion by 2008.
According to the Global Outsourcing Survey, which Horasis claimed was the first-of-its-kind to rank countries on the basis of opportunities, costs and risks they presented for IT outsourcing, nearly 75 per cent of the US companies outsourced their information technology activities in 2004.
The percentage of such companies is likely to increase this year. While few companies are outsourcing those activities offshore, half of them have cut full-time jobs.
"Outsourcing has become a supercharged issue, thanks to the fears of job loss, but despite the political difficulties, the strategy can provide huge corporate benefits in terms of productivity, prices, profits and wages. But companies need to be able to assess the risks and benefits of each country they are considering as an outsourcing destination," said Frank-Jurgen Richter, president, Horasis.
"The report makes an important intellectual and practical contribution to addressing one of the most dramatic business trends in present history -- outsourcing and offshoring--as we attempt to enact visions for a sustainable future," added Richter.
The report uses two different indices -- the global outsourcing index and the future outsourcing rank -- and it contains an analytical country profile for each of the 20 economies in the study.
The GOI is a weighted index made up of three separate ratings: the cost of doing business in each country; seven risk factors (including geopolitical, human capital, IT competency, economics, legal, cultural and IT infrastructure); and market opportunities.
The Future Outsourcing Index, which assesses long-term (10 years) competitiveness of the top 30 future outsourcing countries, is determined from GDP growth, population growth, the quality of the labour pool and the analysis from leading entrepreneurs, economists and other experts.
Hope springs eternal...
*
India will remain the most popular outsourcing destination in 2005 and will be on the list of the best five outsourcing countries in the world till 2015
*
India's IT outsourcing exports have registered a 27 per cent growth in 2003-04 to reach $2.5 billion and the revenues from IT enabled services may touch $3.6 billion
* Nasscom and IT research firm, Gartner, estimate that India's earnings from the ITES will go up to $20 billion by 2008
1/01/2007
Outsourcing: perception vs reality
The opportunities presented by outsourcing are considerable, but so are the challenges. A commentary by someone in the thick of things
“India’s pool of young university graduates is estimated at 14 million—the largest of all 28 countries MGI has studied. It is 1.5 times the size of China’s, and almost twice that of the United States. This huge number of young graduates is topped up by 2.5 million new ones every year.”
— McKinsey Global Institute
Anil Kini
When the first software code was written nobody could have predicted that the year 2000 would shake the IT world to its foundations. The world woke up with an unknown, unseen, and imaginary threat of Y2K looming over it. The need of the hour was to update computer systems so that they would continue to run as 2000 dawned and beyond.
During the same time, India, one of the largest English-speaking pools possessing a highly educated young population, was trying to establish a foothold in the IT industry. It was a natural choice of companies, mainly those in the United States, to see if they could tap the resources of the Indian software industry to counter the immediate threat of Y2K. That was Indian IT’s first break.
Worldwide enterprise IT expenditures soared from $175 billion at the decade’s start to more than $525 billion in 2000. It was the first time that India started dating the US.
Post-Y2K, the IT world placed its biggest bet ever on e-commerce (dotcoms). This failed miserably, and the dreams of hundreds of entrepreneurs were shattered. However, the world of IT discovered a few gems from the experience, and one of these was the existence of low-cost, highly-skilled Indian labour.
The need of the hour
The economy fell flat on its face in 2001. To run enterprise systems, especially legacy, CRM and ERP became an expensive and unwieldy affair. With labour alone accounting for nearly 75 percent of the cost of software development, finding talented staff, nurturing them and keeping them permanently on the payroll appeared to be a liability. Most CIOs in the US and Europe had been forced to change their IT policies and adopt strategies to curb in-house IT spending.
Their response to this crisis was to lay-off their in-house IT talent and hunt for third-party vendors who could support their enterprise systems by either co-locating to the company’s own premises or by offering remote support.
IT leaders soon realised that using resources from countries such as India and China would help them save on IT spending by nearly 50 to 70 percent.
It was not an employee-friendly policy, but little attention was paid to the protests that followed. The process of laying off in developed countries and shifting jobs offshore to countries where labour was cheap started simultaneously.
McKinsey predicts that IT offshoring will result in net savings to the American economy of $390 billion by 2010. $24 billion of outsourcing contracts will be signed in 2006.
Asian countries such as India, China and Taiwan offer a formidable combination of low wages and regular supply of skilled resources geared up to tap the huge market for offshoring.
Indians specialised in custom application maintenance and distinct management practices. They began to offer a range of software services and consulting.
Destination India
India’s pool of young university graduates (those with seven years or less of work experience) is estimated at 14 million.
As of December 2005, over 400 Indian companies had acquired quality certifications with 82 companies certified at SEI CMM Level 5, making India the top in terms of certifications worldwide.
A recent survey by Nasscom found that almost two out of five Fortune 500 companies outsource some of their software requirements to India. More companies are going offshore to develop and maintain their software. GE, Bank of America, Target, and American Express, for example, have formed partnerships with Indian IT firms or started their own development centres. The reason is obvious: this approach saves time and money. Moreover, it is steadily growing more attractive. Last year, North American companies alone spent $114 billion on in-house software development, contracting, and purchases—and these costs will only go up as additional basic business processes are conducted over the Internet.
In 2004-05, the Indian offshore IT and business-process-outsourcing industry will generate approximately $17.3 billion in revenues.
Offshoring economics
* It’s the exchange rate. The exchange rate of the Indian rupee vis-à-vis major currencies such as the US dollar, UK pound sterling, and the Euro are wide and continue to be so. As long as the exchange rates undervalue the rupee, this cost advantage will continue. Although recent years have seen a trend in rupee appreciation against the US dollar and other major currencies, it is likely that the appreciation will be slow and steady over the long term, and it is unlikely to alter the economics of the offshore model.
* Lower cost of living. Although India is in a post-liberalisation era, basic commodities still enjoy government protection and inflation is under control, hence there is room for salaries in India to become more competitive in response to competition from other countries.
Coming of age
After realising cost savings and growth in revenue, there is a gold rush to outsource software work to Indian companies. American and European establishments moved to outsource their in-house work either to low-cost countries, primarily India, or to open development centres to achieve further control over costs. It has been found that 80 percent of IT services or help-desk jobs are already being performed remotely.
The global outsourcing of IT and BPO services has grown nearly three times over the last five years. So far Indian vendors have managed to corner the lion’s share of outsourced business. That said, a recent study revealed the surprising fact that India could bag only 10 percent of the global outsourcing pie. In 2006-07 itself, around $50-70 billion worth of contracts are in the pipeline, either to outsource or for renewal.
The Indian IT-BPO industry stretches itself to accept challenges and gain a large share of the growing outsourcing business by expanding operations beyond the metros to counter the crumbling infrastructure and scarcity of IT professionals in the big cities. IBM’s headcount in India that currently stands at 38,500 professionals will increase by another 50,000 over the next 12-15 months (source: www.rediff.com). Accenture, with around 20,000 people in India, is targeting a base of 50,000 professionals in South-East Asia by 2009. The top three domestic majors (TCS, Infosys, and Wipro) plan to add another 60,000 people over the next 18 months.
It is expected that the Indian software biggies will make more acquisitions in India and abroad to move up the value chain, and that they will acquire domain expertise. Companies will offer end-to-end solutions from business consultancy to help-desk. They will even offer near-shore support by providing support from nearby countries (e.g. Canada for US clients).
Remote management
Rising wages leading to high levels of attrition are worrying factors not only for Indian IT leaders but also for major US clients
As IT vendors get ready to offer services of superior quality at a low cost and on demand, organisations have changed their outsource strategy to split a deal across several IT vendors to minimise risk and get a competitive price. It is advisable to renew contracts at a frequency of 3 to 5 years to ensure that vendors compete among themselves in service provisioning.
Vendors need more specialised leaders to handle contract management. These outsourcing leaders will be the link to CIOs in the client companies. On the part of the client, it needs to do more than merely outsource. These leaders have to perform a multi-purpose role of negotiator and collaborator, and provide leadership to an offshore team.
So where is the problem?
* Low-value job. During the early days of outsourcing it was commonly perceived that the way to go was to choose jobs that were repetitive in nature. Low-business-value maintenance tasks were offloaded to vendors. This was principally because business leaders were not fully aware of the capabilities of these vendor, their skills and strengths, or simply not confident about their ability to deliver the goods.
* Cultural differences. For many years, India among developing countries remained aloof from westernisation, hence there is a cultural barrier hindering us from picking up outsourcing momentum. Clashes between different languages, cultures, and work practices can make collaborating with a client a formidable challenge.
* Know the business. Indian techies were good in following ‘what they were being asked to do.’ It was common to find displeased American and European clients finding that sending work offshore did not always bring value to business. One reason was a mismatch between the IT capabilities of client companies and those of the offshore vendors.
* Communication. With client and vendor teams being located thousands of miles apart, voice communication remains a critical tool to carry out daily business. Oftentimes, cultural difference and an absence of professionalism prevent a vendor from rising to the occasion.
* Different time zones. As Indian vendors started supporting clients located in other countries across time zones, it became imperative to offer support to their clients in their time zones for services rendered. It has always been seen as a challenge to provide after-office-hours support, a problem further exacerbated by poor infrastructure.
Setting aside the top IT and management schools, the quality of education in other educational establishments hasn’t kept pace with the times; the curriculum is often out of date and unsuited to current market needs.
A large portion of the population of engineering graduates are attracted to foreign jobs as they are looking for better opportunities and an assured financial future.
Indian entrepreneurs and multinationals are setting up shop, ensuring that the demand for experienced resources stays high. Today, everyone is engage in poaching talent rather than building it from scratch. Naturally, keeping salaries high to lure talent is ‘bad in the long run.’
Wage differential
Rising wages leading to high levels of attrition are worrying factors not only for Indian IT leaders but also for major US clients. Almost everyone is on a hiring spree, with multi-million dollar deals about to be signed in the near future. It’s almost imperative to have the right talent at the right time. The upshot of all this is that each one is engaged in talent poaching.
Soon, average wages in the IT sector will reach a threshold. However, there remains a wide gap between Indian and Western wages, so it may take a decade for parity to be established. Almost all IT companies have concentrated their operations in a handful of cities, hence the demand and supply equation of talent remains inversely proportional.
The story of Indian IT is mainly written by private players with little government support. While the government is adamant in emphasising its role in creating a conducive atmosphere, the reality is that the infrastructure is worse than bad, that the telecom sector growth to support corporate initiatives is happening at a snail’s pace, and that this growth is principally focussed on adding individual subscribers.
The Indian state needs foreign direct investment, but entrepreneurs often face embarrassment in accompanying foreign delegates from crumbling airports to swank company headquarters.
Ensuring a secure future
* Collaboration rather than competition. As everyone needs skilled resources to grab outsourcing deals, a wage war is underway to attract talent by any means. It is not impossible to collaborate with competitors where each player can leverage the other’s domain and industry experience. The advantages are two-fold. They can bid together to claim a strength that neither possesses alone instead losing a deal by flying solo, and most important of all avoid compromising on the profit margin which usually gets hit when both players would otherwise be competing. It is a clear win-win situation.
* Innovate, not replicate. Offshoring often ends up replicating the same model that already exists at the client’s end. On the face of it, it does save money for the client because of the wage differential. In the long run however, it doesn’t add value to the client’s business. Beyond transition, it is transformation that can play a greater role in realising business goals. Indian talent often goes to waste merely doing things rather than innovating. The client should encourage and vendors should propose the best model that will work in the long run to sustain the client’s revenue growth. This is possible only when the client sees a vendor as a partner and allows him to make the decision rather than seeing him purely as a service provider.
Global and local
Tier-1 Indian companies are seen making outsourcing deals valued in the range of $200-300 million. It is global IT majors such as IBM and Accenture that continue to dominate mega, multi-geography deals. This is mainly because of their capability, global presence, and the ability to offer infrastructure support in addition to services under one roof. The primary challenge of India’s leading software houses will be to expand beyond the country’s borders by building worldwide networks capable of providing advanced services—both in distant, low-cost locations and in the customer’s home country.
One should not hesitate to say that Indian companies must shift their headquarters from India. That’s the only way to make them truly global entities.
Spreading wings into emerging countries will force companies to adapt their recruiting and training skills. It may take Indian companies several years to build skills and brands worldwide. To manage a global presence, these organisations will need leaders who are effective across organisational and national boundaries.
It is also important to generate the friction that shapes and sharpens learning when people of different backgrounds and skills collaborate on real problems. Clear performance targets, an unconstrained environment for finding solutions, and the sharing of prototypes across organisational boundaries generally produces the most beneficial results. Processes must be developed with the help of new generations of information technology to ensure that innovations are disseminated across the network.
What India should do
* Know your customer. Know his problems and business imperatives. Make sure that the product or service you are providing drives his business objectives further and solves his problems. It actually takes a lot to achieve this. It requires that people currently supporting various client businesses should be in touch with customers beyond just the IT task at hand. They must unleash technologies that can help solve complex problems, integrate various loose pieces, and grow the client’s business. Establishing a comfortable level of mutual trust and confidence with the customer is a crucial exercise. This can be cultivated through improved visibility and authoritative participation in industry events and conferences. People should come to be recognised as respected authorities in their area of business.
* On demand. The business scenario is changing faster than the time it takes to design a solution. The future belongs to those who can conceive fresher ideas and solutions. An organisation today needs to be innovative, to which end it must offer an environment where creative people can deliver results and make continuous improvements. Innovating requires a number of inputs; one needs to be aware of the market situation, identify trends, keep pace with emerging technologies, and effectively use this knowledge to come up with solutions before competitors can.
Things India should avoid
Today, India clearly dominates the IT outsourcing arena. It has a few superior characteristics when compared to its nearest rival. Competition is wide but the runner-up is far behind India. It is natural to enjoy today’s success and assume that tomorrow’s business is assured. However, the environment is changing rapidly, clients expect more from their vendors, and they often bring more players to the deal to get competitive prices. To counter this challenge, vendors need a different strategy that can provide steady results. To remain alert and not get carried away with today’s successes is imperative.
There is a need to invest in resources and employees. Training is a weak area. Beyond academic education, which itself is often not paid sufficient attention, investment in role-based training and building domain skills should be taken up as a priority. This will help Indian techies communicate with clients in their own business language.
Product development is quite low vis-à-vis application services. Today’s business faces many problems and different practices to perform the same function. The Indian presence across geographies and businesses in all industries gives Indian companies the opportunity to offer streamlined processes with easily adoptable products. Indian IT leaders should take risks in product development rather than stay content in enjoying the safety of services.
Services follow products. The client is not aware of where there is room for improvement to minimise long operation cycles and arrest revenue leakage. Re-engineering services is an unexplored area that needs immediate attention and sustained effort.
“India’s pool of young university graduates is estimated at 14 million—the largest of all 28 countries MGI has studied. It is 1.5 times the size of China’s, and almost twice that of the United States. This huge number of young graduates is topped up by 2.5 million new ones every year.”
— McKinsey Global Institute
Anil Kini
When the first software code was written nobody could have predicted that the year 2000 would shake the IT world to its foundations. The world woke up with an unknown, unseen, and imaginary threat of Y2K looming over it. The need of the hour was to update computer systems so that they would continue to run as 2000 dawned and beyond.
During the same time, India, one of the largest English-speaking pools possessing a highly educated young population, was trying to establish a foothold in the IT industry. It was a natural choice of companies, mainly those in the United States, to see if they could tap the resources of the Indian software industry to counter the immediate threat of Y2K. That was Indian IT’s first break.
Worldwide enterprise IT expenditures soared from $175 billion at the decade’s start to more than $525 billion in 2000. It was the first time that India started dating the US.
Post-Y2K, the IT world placed its biggest bet ever on e-commerce (dotcoms). This failed miserably, and the dreams of hundreds of entrepreneurs were shattered. However, the world of IT discovered a few gems from the experience, and one of these was the existence of low-cost, highly-skilled Indian labour.
The need of the hour
The economy fell flat on its face in 2001. To run enterprise systems, especially legacy, CRM and ERP became an expensive and unwieldy affair. With labour alone accounting for nearly 75 percent of the cost of software development, finding talented staff, nurturing them and keeping them permanently on the payroll appeared to be a liability. Most CIOs in the US and Europe had been forced to change their IT policies and adopt strategies to curb in-house IT spending.
Their response to this crisis was to lay-off their in-house IT talent and hunt for third-party vendors who could support their enterprise systems by either co-locating to the company’s own premises or by offering remote support.
IT leaders soon realised that using resources from countries such as India and China would help them save on IT spending by nearly 50 to 70 percent.
It was not an employee-friendly policy, but little attention was paid to the protests that followed. The process of laying off in developed countries and shifting jobs offshore to countries where labour was cheap started simultaneously.
McKinsey predicts that IT offshoring will result in net savings to the American economy of $390 billion by 2010. $24 billion of outsourcing contracts will be signed in 2006.
Asian countries such as India, China and Taiwan offer a formidable combination of low wages and regular supply of skilled resources geared up to tap the huge market for offshoring.
Indians specialised in custom application maintenance and distinct management practices. They began to offer a range of software services and consulting.
Destination India
India’s pool of young university graduates (those with seven years or less of work experience) is estimated at 14 million.
As of December 2005, over 400 Indian companies had acquired quality certifications with 82 companies certified at SEI CMM Level 5, making India the top in terms of certifications worldwide.
A recent survey by Nasscom found that almost two out of five Fortune 500 companies outsource some of their software requirements to India. More companies are going offshore to develop and maintain their software. GE, Bank of America, Target, and American Express, for example, have formed partnerships with Indian IT firms or started their own development centres. The reason is obvious: this approach saves time and money. Moreover, it is steadily growing more attractive. Last year, North American companies alone spent $114 billion on in-house software development, contracting, and purchases—and these costs will only go up as additional basic business processes are conducted over the Internet.
In 2004-05, the Indian offshore IT and business-process-outsourcing industry will generate approximately $17.3 billion in revenues.
Offshoring economics
* It’s the exchange rate. The exchange rate of the Indian rupee vis-à-vis major currencies such as the US dollar, UK pound sterling, and the Euro are wide and continue to be so. As long as the exchange rates undervalue the rupee, this cost advantage will continue. Although recent years have seen a trend in rupee appreciation against the US dollar and other major currencies, it is likely that the appreciation will be slow and steady over the long term, and it is unlikely to alter the economics of the offshore model.
* Lower cost of living. Although India is in a post-liberalisation era, basic commodities still enjoy government protection and inflation is under control, hence there is room for salaries in India to become more competitive in response to competition from other countries.
Coming of age
After realising cost savings and growth in revenue, there is a gold rush to outsource software work to Indian companies. American and European establishments moved to outsource their in-house work either to low-cost countries, primarily India, or to open development centres to achieve further control over costs. It has been found that 80 percent of IT services or help-desk jobs are already being performed remotely.
The global outsourcing of IT and BPO services has grown nearly three times over the last five years. So far Indian vendors have managed to corner the lion’s share of outsourced business. That said, a recent study revealed the surprising fact that India could bag only 10 percent of the global outsourcing pie. In 2006-07 itself, around $50-70 billion worth of contracts are in the pipeline, either to outsource or for renewal.
The Indian IT-BPO industry stretches itself to accept challenges and gain a large share of the growing outsourcing business by expanding operations beyond the metros to counter the crumbling infrastructure and scarcity of IT professionals in the big cities. IBM’s headcount in India that currently stands at 38,500 professionals will increase by another 50,000 over the next 12-15 months (source: www.rediff.com). Accenture, with around 20,000 people in India, is targeting a base of 50,000 professionals in South-East Asia by 2009. The top three domestic majors (TCS, Infosys, and Wipro) plan to add another 60,000 people over the next 18 months.
It is expected that the Indian software biggies will make more acquisitions in India and abroad to move up the value chain, and that they will acquire domain expertise. Companies will offer end-to-end solutions from business consultancy to help-desk. They will even offer near-shore support by providing support from nearby countries (e.g. Canada for US clients).
Remote management
Rising wages leading to high levels of attrition are worrying factors not only for Indian IT leaders but also for major US clients
As IT vendors get ready to offer services of superior quality at a low cost and on demand, organisations have changed their outsource strategy to split a deal across several IT vendors to minimise risk and get a competitive price. It is advisable to renew contracts at a frequency of 3 to 5 years to ensure that vendors compete among themselves in service provisioning.
Vendors need more specialised leaders to handle contract management. These outsourcing leaders will be the link to CIOs in the client companies. On the part of the client, it needs to do more than merely outsource. These leaders have to perform a multi-purpose role of negotiator and collaborator, and provide leadership to an offshore team.
So where is the problem?
* Low-value job. During the early days of outsourcing it was commonly perceived that the way to go was to choose jobs that were repetitive in nature. Low-business-value maintenance tasks were offloaded to vendors. This was principally because business leaders were not fully aware of the capabilities of these vendor, their skills and strengths, or simply not confident about their ability to deliver the goods.
* Cultural differences. For many years, India among developing countries remained aloof from westernisation, hence there is a cultural barrier hindering us from picking up outsourcing momentum. Clashes between different languages, cultures, and work practices can make collaborating with a client a formidable challenge.
* Know the business. Indian techies were good in following ‘what they were being asked to do.’ It was common to find displeased American and European clients finding that sending work offshore did not always bring value to business. One reason was a mismatch between the IT capabilities of client companies and those of the offshore vendors.
* Communication. With client and vendor teams being located thousands of miles apart, voice communication remains a critical tool to carry out daily business. Oftentimes, cultural difference and an absence of professionalism prevent a vendor from rising to the occasion.
* Different time zones. As Indian vendors started supporting clients located in other countries across time zones, it became imperative to offer support to their clients in their time zones for services rendered. It has always been seen as a challenge to provide after-office-hours support, a problem further exacerbated by poor infrastructure.
Setting aside the top IT and management schools, the quality of education in other educational establishments hasn’t kept pace with the times; the curriculum is often out of date and unsuited to current market needs.
A large portion of the population of engineering graduates are attracted to foreign jobs as they are looking for better opportunities and an assured financial future.
Indian entrepreneurs and multinationals are setting up shop, ensuring that the demand for experienced resources stays high. Today, everyone is engage in poaching talent rather than building it from scratch. Naturally, keeping salaries high to lure talent is ‘bad in the long run.’
Wage differential
Rising wages leading to high levels of attrition are worrying factors not only for Indian IT leaders but also for major US clients. Almost everyone is on a hiring spree, with multi-million dollar deals about to be signed in the near future. It’s almost imperative to have the right talent at the right time. The upshot of all this is that each one is engaged in talent poaching.
Soon, average wages in the IT sector will reach a threshold. However, there remains a wide gap between Indian and Western wages, so it may take a decade for parity to be established. Almost all IT companies have concentrated their operations in a handful of cities, hence the demand and supply equation of talent remains inversely proportional.
The story of Indian IT is mainly written by private players with little government support. While the government is adamant in emphasising its role in creating a conducive atmosphere, the reality is that the infrastructure is worse than bad, that the telecom sector growth to support corporate initiatives is happening at a snail’s pace, and that this growth is principally focussed on adding individual subscribers.
The Indian state needs foreign direct investment, but entrepreneurs often face embarrassment in accompanying foreign delegates from crumbling airports to swank company headquarters.
Ensuring a secure future
* Collaboration rather than competition. As everyone needs skilled resources to grab outsourcing deals, a wage war is underway to attract talent by any means. It is not impossible to collaborate with competitors where each player can leverage the other’s domain and industry experience. The advantages are two-fold. They can bid together to claim a strength that neither possesses alone instead losing a deal by flying solo, and most important of all avoid compromising on the profit margin which usually gets hit when both players would otherwise be competing. It is a clear win-win situation.
* Innovate, not replicate. Offshoring often ends up replicating the same model that already exists at the client’s end. On the face of it, it does save money for the client because of the wage differential. In the long run however, it doesn’t add value to the client’s business. Beyond transition, it is transformation that can play a greater role in realising business goals. Indian talent often goes to waste merely doing things rather than innovating. The client should encourage and vendors should propose the best model that will work in the long run to sustain the client’s revenue growth. This is possible only when the client sees a vendor as a partner and allows him to make the decision rather than seeing him purely as a service provider.
Global and local
Tier-1 Indian companies are seen making outsourcing deals valued in the range of $200-300 million. It is global IT majors such as IBM and Accenture that continue to dominate mega, multi-geography deals. This is mainly because of their capability, global presence, and the ability to offer infrastructure support in addition to services under one roof. The primary challenge of India’s leading software houses will be to expand beyond the country’s borders by building worldwide networks capable of providing advanced services—both in distant, low-cost locations and in the customer’s home country.
One should not hesitate to say that Indian companies must shift their headquarters from India. That’s the only way to make them truly global entities.
Spreading wings into emerging countries will force companies to adapt their recruiting and training skills. It may take Indian companies several years to build skills and brands worldwide. To manage a global presence, these organisations will need leaders who are effective across organisational and national boundaries.
It is also important to generate the friction that shapes and sharpens learning when people of different backgrounds and skills collaborate on real problems. Clear performance targets, an unconstrained environment for finding solutions, and the sharing of prototypes across organisational boundaries generally produces the most beneficial results. Processes must be developed with the help of new generations of information technology to ensure that innovations are disseminated across the network.
What India should do
* Know your customer. Know his problems and business imperatives. Make sure that the product or service you are providing drives his business objectives further and solves his problems. It actually takes a lot to achieve this. It requires that people currently supporting various client businesses should be in touch with customers beyond just the IT task at hand. They must unleash technologies that can help solve complex problems, integrate various loose pieces, and grow the client’s business. Establishing a comfortable level of mutual trust and confidence with the customer is a crucial exercise. This can be cultivated through improved visibility and authoritative participation in industry events and conferences. People should come to be recognised as respected authorities in their area of business.
* On demand. The business scenario is changing faster than the time it takes to design a solution. The future belongs to those who can conceive fresher ideas and solutions. An organisation today needs to be innovative, to which end it must offer an environment where creative people can deliver results and make continuous improvements. Innovating requires a number of inputs; one needs to be aware of the market situation, identify trends, keep pace with emerging technologies, and effectively use this knowledge to come up with solutions before competitors can.
Things India should avoid
Today, India clearly dominates the IT outsourcing arena. It has a few superior characteristics when compared to its nearest rival. Competition is wide but the runner-up is far behind India. It is natural to enjoy today’s success and assume that tomorrow’s business is assured. However, the environment is changing rapidly, clients expect more from their vendors, and they often bring more players to the deal to get competitive prices. To counter this challenge, vendors need a different strategy that can provide steady results. To remain alert and not get carried away with today’s successes is imperative.
There is a need to invest in resources and employees. Training is a weak area. Beyond academic education, which itself is often not paid sufficient attention, investment in role-based training and building domain skills should be taken up as a priority. This will help Indian techies communicate with clients in their own business language.
Product development is quite low vis-à-vis application services. Today’s business faces many problems and different practices to perform the same function. The Indian presence across geographies and businesses in all industries gives Indian companies the opportunity to offer streamlined processes with easily adoptable products. Indian IT leaders should take risks in product development rather than stay content in enjoying the safety of services.
Services follow products. The client is not aware of where there is room for improvement to minimise long operation cycles and arrest revenue leakage. Re-engineering services is an unexplored area that needs immediate attention and sustained effort.
Offshoring: The Job Creator
Employee unions and various politicians have long blamed offshoring for overall job losses in the U.S. economy. Business lobby groups who perceive “labor arbitrage” as a means for cutting cost and a sure-shot way to impress Wall Street, have defended it vehemently. They have used studies by thought leaders to argue that in the long-term offshoring creates value for the U.S. economy. McKinsey Global Institute, in a study three years ago, estimated that for every dollar spent on offshoring by the U.S. companies, $1.47 worth of value is created for the global economy, out of which close to $1.14 comes back to the U.S. economy. Free-trade proponents, among them economists like Gregory Mankiw and Jagdish Bhagwati, have also maintained that offshoring is not very different from any other international trade, and at the end, everyone gains. President Bush, during his India visit, defended offshoring by saying, it creates markets for American products.
Since for the average person, there is no way of measuring “value creation” for the economy, these theories have remained largely doubtful.
But a study conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton using the Offshoring Research Network at Duke University has concluded that offshoring has not always led to job losses.
The research studied 537 companies — that included 60% companies that have used offshoring and 17% more that are considering it — spread across U.S. and Europe. It measured, function-wise, whether offshoring implementation has actually led to job losses.
The results are revealing. It found that while offshoring of simple back-office functions did lead to some job losses, it was much less when it came to higher-value functions. Even in Human Resources (HR) and Finance and Accounting (F&A) outsourcing, where the job losses were maximum, in as many as 54% of offshoring cases, there was no job loss. The figure of “no job lost” offshoring increases as it moves to higher-value functions. In engineering services, for example, in as many as 70% instances there was no job loss. That figure is 74% in product design and 87% in marketing and sales.
Interestingly, the figure was highest for research and development, where it was 106%, meaning in some cases, jobs actually got created onshore because of offshoring.
“The obvious implications from the above findings is that as companies offshore functions that require higher-skilled talent, they are less motivated by labor arbitrage,” the study notes.
In fact, across functions (including HR and F&A), in more than half the cases, there was no job loss due to offshoring. For higher-value functions, in three out of four cases, there was no job loss. So obviously, the companies are creating value not just by replacing high-cost labor with low-cost labor. In simpler terms, labor arbitration, in reality, is not labor arbitrage.
Since for the average person, there is no way of measuring “value creation” for the economy, these theories have remained largely doubtful.
But a study conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton using the Offshoring Research Network at Duke University has concluded that offshoring has not always led to job losses.
The research studied 537 companies — that included 60% companies that have used offshoring and 17% more that are considering it — spread across U.S. and Europe. It measured, function-wise, whether offshoring implementation has actually led to job losses.
The results are revealing. It found that while offshoring of simple back-office functions did lead to some job losses, it was much less when it came to higher-value functions. Even in Human Resources (HR) and Finance and Accounting (F&A) outsourcing, where the job losses were maximum, in as many as 54% of offshoring cases, there was no job loss. The figure of “no job lost” offshoring increases as it moves to higher-value functions. In engineering services, for example, in as many as 70% instances there was no job loss. That figure is 74% in product design and 87% in marketing and sales.
Interestingly, the figure was highest for research and development, where it was 106%, meaning in some cases, jobs actually got created onshore because of offshoring.
“The obvious implications from the above findings is that as companies offshore functions that require higher-skilled talent, they are less motivated by labor arbitrage,” the study notes.
In fact, across functions (including HR and F&A), in more than half the cases, there was no job loss due to offshoring. For higher-value functions, in three out of four cases, there was no job loss. So obviously, the companies are creating value not just by replacing high-cost labor with low-cost labor. In simpler terms, labor arbitration, in reality, is not labor arbitrage.
China Telecom Outsources CRM Telemarketing Services to PacificNet Epro
China Telecom, a China-based fixed-service telecommunications provider, has awarded an outsourcing deal to PacificNet Epro, a China-based outsourced call center, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and telemarketing services, e-commerce, VAS and IVR, gaming and mobile internet services provider. The duration and financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Under the terms of the agreement, PacificNet Epro will enhance the CRM service-level and telemarketing-management capability of China Telecom’s customer-services center. PacificNet Epro will also be responsible for various services, including development of outsourcing telemarketing programs, call-center workflow design, business management, project Return on Investment, customer affinity, designing effective telemarketing scripts, and improving customer service agent capabilities.
Under the terms of the agreement, PacificNet Epro will enhance the CRM service-level and telemarketing-management capability of China Telecom’s customer-services center. PacificNet Epro will also be responsible for various services, including development of outsourcing telemarketing programs, call-center workflow design, business management, project Return on Investment, customer affinity, designing effective telemarketing scripts, and improving customer service agent capabilities.
China and India strive to keep economies booming
Poverty, water shortages, environmental crises: China and India confront daunting challenges as they strive to keep their economies expanding fast enough to raise growing numbers of their 2.3 billion people out of poverty.
For each, the potential is huge, but then so are the risks.
By the numbers, both economies look poised to continue their remarkable performances in 2007. The Chinese economy grew 10.4 percent in the July- September quarter compared with a year earlier, with forecasts for growth in 2007-8 at about 10 percent.
The Indian economy is close behind. It grew 9.2 percent in the quarter that ended in September — its strongest performance since 1991. The International Monetary Fund estimated that inflation-fighting measures could slow growth to 7.3 percent in the year starting in April 2007, down from the 8.3 percent expected for this year.
Such stratospheric figures highlight China's rise as an export power and India's newfound cachet as an outsourcing center for the high-technology industry, as well as robust growth in its agricultural, industrial and services sectors.
But the gleaming new office buildings in cities like Shanghai and Mumbai, with their legions of newly affluent consumers snapping up the latest cellphones and new sedans, stand in stark contrast to the poverty that persists in both countries, particularly in rural areas.
Some 10 percent of the 1.3 billion people in China live on less than $1 a day, according to the World Bank. In India, with a population of 1.1 billion, about 40 percent do.
"There is an India of bursting growth, and there is an India of widespread want," Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the governing coalition in India, said at a recent business conference in New Delhi.
More than a third of all Indians can neither read nor write, and a fifth of them have no access to safe drinking water. Poverty and unemployment are fueling insurgencies and Communist-led rebellions in many parts of the country.
Still, both economies have proven remarkably resilient, adapting outdated trade and industrial policies while blunting the impact of those reforms on their poorest citizens with price controls and subsidies to farmers.
Tens of billions of dollars of foreign direct investment, coupled with strong domestic spending, is supporting heavy investment to build railways, ports and other infrastructure needed to support further growth. Steel making, cement and many other industries have prospered.
And in both countries, share prices have surged because of optimism over growth and rising corporate competitiveness, with Indian stocks trading at all-time highs and those in Shanghai just below the peak they hit in 2001.
But leaders in China and India are realizing that greater equity, better protection for the environment and stewardship of scarce resources are needed to sustain growth and lift tens of millions more out of poverty. Both governments have stepped up rural spending and increased subsidies to the poor while attempting to attract more investment for backward inland regions cut off from the growth centers along the coasts.
The Indian government plans to spend $26 billion in 2005-9 to build rural homes, expand irrigation coverage and provide drinking water, electricity and phone connections for all the nation's villages. It is too early to say whether those initiatives, as well as a rural employment scheme, will be able to meet their objectives or will degenerate into populist rhetoric.
The Communist leaders of China, who face no electoral pressures and do not tolerate public or organized dissent, have acknowledged the threat to their nearly six decades of rule as public anger increases over ubiquitous corruption and the widening gulf between rich city dwellers and the rural poor.
Raising rural incomes has become a top priority, both for ensuring political stability and for bolstering the domestic consumer demand required to sustain growth over the long term. Leaders in China have abolished farm taxes and made schooling free for rural families, hoping to help redress the huge gap with city dwellers. More such gestures are likely ahead of a Communist Party congress in late 2007.
"Can China sustain 8 percent to 10 percent growth?" asked Yiping Huang, an economist with Citigroup in Shanghai. "It has to do more to stimulate consumption, a lot more." He added, "It needs to do more for social welfare so that people can feel comfortable and spend more."
At the same time, China is just barely beginning to address the huge environmental costs of its headlong rush to industrialize: fouled water and air, rural villages drowning in waste and massive shortages of water and other resources.
Another risk that China faces is an overheating economy. Worried that soaring investment in real estate and construction could leave banks with bad loans, authorities have raised interest rates and implemented other measures to curb borrowing. In meetings this month, officials said they would continue those policies.
Economists have repeatedly warned that despite multibillion-dollar write- offs of bad debt and spectacular international stock offerings, state-owned Chinese banks could fall prey to bad debts, especially if growth slows.
"When the economy is doing well, we don't see big financial risks," Huang said. "But when economic growth slows, nonperforming loans rise."
India faces an uphill battle to rein in the insurgencies and terrorism that threaten the country's investment climate.
Beyond the unrest in Kashmir, analysts worry about a growing Maoist rebellion in parts of southern and eastern India that they have said is fueled by economic deprivation and uneven growth.
Insurgent groups are also active in remote northeastern India, where local people often accuse the federal government of exploiting the region's rich mineral resources without bringing much benefit to its inhabitants.
India is also vulnerable to domestic risks and so-called external risks like volatile oil prices and a resurgence of protectionism, which would crimp export growth.
And India has yet to bring surging prices under control: Finance Minister P. Chidambaram had termed the nation's 5 percent-plus inflation rate "worrisome."
Yet with growth at its highest level in 15 years, Chidambaram remains upbeat. "Just savor the moment," he said.
Beijing to push rural lending
China plans to give rural lenders more flexibility to set deposit and lending rates as well as to cut their tax burdens in a government effort to strengthen the rural economy, the chief banking regulator said Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported from Shanghai.
The government could also allow Agricultural Development Bank, one of the nation's three policy banks, to offer loans to small enterprises in the countryside, Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, said in Beijing.
For each, the potential is huge, but then so are the risks.
By the numbers, both economies look poised to continue their remarkable performances in 2007. The Chinese economy grew 10.4 percent in the July- September quarter compared with a year earlier, with forecasts for growth in 2007-8 at about 10 percent.
The Indian economy is close behind. It grew 9.2 percent in the quarter that ended in September — its strongest performance since 1991. The International Monetary Fund estimated that inflation-fighting measures could slow growth to 7.3 percent in the year starting in April 2007, down from the 8.3 percent expected for this year.
Such stratospheric figures highlight China's rise as an export power and India's newfound cachet as an outsourcing center for the high-technology industry, as well as robust growth in its agricultural, industrial and services sectors.
But the gleaming new office buildings in cities like Shanghai and Mumbai, with their legions of newly affluent consumers snapping up the latest cellphones and new sedans, stand in stark contrast to the poverty that persists in both countries, particularly in rural areas.
Some 10 percent of the 1.3 billion people in China live on less than $1 a day, according to the World Bank. In India, with a population of 1.1 billion, about 40 percent do.
"There is an India of bursting growth, and there is an India of widespread want," Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the governing coalition in India, said at a recent business conference in New Delhi.
More than a third of all Indians can neither read nor write, and a fifth of them have no access to safe drinking water. Poverty and unemployment are fueling insurgencies and Communist-led rebellions in many parts of the country.
Still, both economies have proven remarkably resilient, adapting outdated trade and industrial policies while blunting the impact of those reforms on their poorest citizens with price controls and subsidies to farmers.
Tens of billions of dollars of foreign direct investment, coupled with strong domestic spending, is supporting heavy investment to build railways, ports and other infrastructure needed to support further growth. Steel making, cement and many other industries have prospered.
And in both countries, share prices have surged because of optimism over growth and rising corporate competitiveness, with Indian stocks trading at all-time highs and those in Shanghai just below the peak they hit in 2001.
But leaders in China and India are realizing that greater equity, better protection for the environment and stewardship of scarce resources are needed to sustain growth and lift tens of millions more out of poverty. Both governments have stepped up rural spending and increased subsidies to the poor while attempting to attract more investment for backward inland regions cut off from the growth centers along the coasts.
The Indian government plans to spend $26 billion in 2005-9 to build rural homes, expand irrigation coverage and provide drinking water, electricity and phone connections for all the nation's villages. It is too early to say whether those initiatives, as well as a rural employment scheme, will be able to meet their objectives or will degenerate into populist rhetoric.
The Communist leaders of China, who face no electoral pressures and do not tolerate public or organized dissent, have acknowledged the threat to their nearly six decades of rule as public anger increases over ubiquitous corruption and the widening gulf between rich city dwellers and the rural poor.
Raising rural incomes has become a top priority, both for ensuring political stability and for bolstering the domestic consumer demand required to sustain growth over the long term. Leaders in China have abolished farm taxes and made schooling free for rural families, hoping to help redress the huge gap with city dwellers. More such gestures are likely ahead of a Communist Party congress in late 2007.
"Can China sustain 8 percent to 10 percent growth?" asked Yiping Huang, an economist with Citigroup in Shanghai. "It has to do more to stimulate consumption, a lot more." He added, "It needs to do more for social welfare so that people can feel comfortable and spend more."
At the same time, China is just barely beginning to address the huge environmental costs of its headlong rush to industrialize: fouled water and air, rural villages drowning in waste and massive shortages of water and other resources.
Another risk that China faces is an overheating economy. Worried that soaring investment in real estate and construction could leave banks with bad loans, authorities have raised interest rates and implemented other measures to curb borrowing. In meetings this month, officials said they would continue those policies.
Economists have repeatedly warned that despite multibillion-dollar write- offs of bad debt and spectacular international stock offerings, state-owned Chinese banks could fall prey to bad debts, especially if growth slows.
"When the economy is doing well, we don't see big financial risks," Huang said. "But when economic growth slows, nonperforming loans rise."
India faces an uphill battle to rein in the insurgencies and terrorism that threaten the country's investment climate.
Beyond the unrest in Kashmir, analysts worry about a growing Maoist rebellion in parts of southern and eastern India that they have said is fueled by economic deprivation and uneven growth.
Insurgent groups are also active in remote northeastern India, where local people often accuse the federal government of exploiting the region's rich mineral resources without bringing much benefit to its inhabitants.
India is also vulnerable to domestic risks and so-called external risks like volatile oil prices and a resurgence of protectionism, which would crimp export growth.
And India has yet to bring surging prices under control: Finance Minister P. Chidambaram had termed the nation's 5 percent-plus inflation rate "worrisome."
Yet with growth at its highest level in 15 years, Chidambaram remains upbeat. "Just savor the moment," he said.
Beijing to push rural lending
China plans to give rural lenders more flexibility to set deposit and lending rates as well as to cut their tax burdens in a government effort to strengthen the rural economy, the chief banking regulator said Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported from Shanghai.
The government could also allow Agricultural Development Bank, one of the nation's three policy banks, to offer loans to small enterprises in the countryside, Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, said in Beijing.
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