India still going strong in KPO, BPO space

MUMBAI, INDIA: Indian companies have revolutionized the Knowledge Processes Outsourcing (KPO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry globally and has been successful in earning lots of respect and values due the high-quality work and performance. Though Indian companies have an edge over others, the industry dynamics are changing as other countries have entered the industry to serve the growing global demands by offering low-cost services.

Lokendra Tomar, Integreon's chief operating officer for APAC talks to Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News about the state of outsourcing business during the US recession, emergence of outsourcing in Asian countries and its impact on India's outsourcing sector, and how India's talent pool is continuing to provide an edge over its competitors and much more. Excerpts:

During 2008-09, due to a global economic downfall particularly in the US, many analysts had predicted that the KPO and BPO industry in India will get more outsourcing business. So how was the business during the past year for Integreon?

I think 2008 was a bad year for everybody when the big meltdown happened, particularly in the late half of 2008 with lots of bankruptcies occurred in the US. And in the first quarter of 2009, most companies world over were in a sort of a crisis management mode and people were trying to figure out how to react to the new environment.

But I think after they recovered by forming strategies, the outsourcing demand has emerged stronger, so we see demand for us going up. Also, the deals which we are signing are redefining the clients and the size of contracts is getting bigger, so the trend for us is very positive. And we have grown really well last year and we continue to see that growth this year as well. Especially in the vertical enterprise level, outsourcing business and legal knowledge and research services demand is as expected.

In recent years with the expansion of the outsourcing industry in various Asian countries due to competitive cost factor, how do you see the Indian outsourcing sector and companies like Integreon maintaining an edge over those countries and earn more business?

I think we realized very early that the competition cannot be on the cost alone. Cost is an important part of client decision making but it cannot compete on the cost model. And there are ways to address it. I think what clients look for is the value delivered to them and you can deliver values in different ways — you can charge a premium for your services but if you are delivering high value to your clients they would pay for it. We have operations on a global basis. While, we have lots of operations in India, we also have operations in countries like Philippines, China, South Africa and Uruguay and also have on-source centers in the UK and US. So we are actually telling our clients that we will use the best possible combinations of locations to deliver services to them, we call it consolation.

Consolation can be a combination of IT products and services or one of them alone and we are saying whatever makes sense for clients' perspective, given the best factor of combination from cost, speed, flexibility, skill sets, value delivered — all of that can be different answers to different clients.

How is the talent supply on the LPO and KPO front in India?

I think at the raw level, there is talent but you need to polish that talent. What I mean by polishing talent is to get them up to a level where they can face professional western clients. So we do a lot of in-house training. When we hire experienced or fresh lawyers in India, we will train them about how to interact with clients as per the expectations of western clients. Similarly, when we hire MBAs we again train them in-house and so everybody who is hired is trained in-house to get them prepared on how to deal with western clients which are qualified MBAs, professional chartered accountants, lawyer and etc.

What kind of in-house training is provided at Integreon?

The training program can vary from two weeks to three months right in front and then there is ongoing training program for everybody. So the initial training would depend on hiring - whether you are hiring a qualified professional or fresher. For qualified person the training can go from one to two week, and up to three months for somebody who has started to manage the clients.

Then there’s a charter of ongoing training part for everybody, which would include training on professional skill-sets as well as technical skill-sets such as IT and domain specific. We have the Integreon Training University which runs about 85 different curriculum related to technical knowledge, domain knowledge which is domain functional knowledge and professional development of managing clients and teams etc. So it is a compulsory participation by every manager and every associate as part of their learning process.