BPO cos advised to focus on sourcing

BANGALORE: The next generation deals would have additional transition risks and recommended to adopt the strategic sourcing life cycle. This was stated here by Gartner analyst, James Longwood during Gartner summit.

Speaking on Next generation outsourcing deals he said that western markets are moving into second generation and third generation outsourcing deals so it's high time to move sourcing up the management agenda.

He also suggested to develop a sourcing strategy aligned to business goals and leverage global and local lessons learned. Also develop guiding and pricing principles, plan for additional transition risks, understand costs involved and configure the bundle services required.

On the evolution in outsourcing, he said that it slowly and steadily moved from simple contracting to strategic sourcing and that service solutions are expanding so, its high time for benchmarking and market testing besides service commoditization.

Speaking in a panel discussion on BPO in India, Raman Roy, CEO, Wipro Spectramind said, that India needs to leverage the full potential of the youth. " Time has come to have a specialized people working in BPO companies and for that we need to have a full fledged training environment."

On the technologies, Andy Kyle, Gartner analyst predicted top 10 strategic technologies for 2005 which include Network security convergence, IP telephony, Software as services, Instant messaging, Utility computing, WLANs, RFID, Grid, Taxonomies and Real-time infrastructure.

The Indian cellular market is the fastest growing in Asia and mobile data revenue would contribute more than 20 percent by 2008, Gartner predicted. Giving an insight to the connected world at the Gartner Summit 2004, Gartner also warned Indian IT players not to ignore the need to ramp capability for capturing domestic market.

A more positive outlook for IT, telecommunications and networking in 2004 has caused many enterprises and suppliers to review their stringent cost-cutting approaches of recent years and begin to focus on gearing for growth again. Business-level initiatives must drive this new agenda but networks, particularly mobile will be key to delivery of the benefits that IT can achieve. This would make India the fastest growing cellular market in the region.

According to Geoff Johnson, VP & Research Director, Gartner, the cellular data services will account for 20.5 percent of total cellular service revenues in 2008, equivalent to Rs 147.6 billion. Overall, India's mobile services market will grow by a compound annual rate of 28.3 percent during the next five years, to touch revenues of Rs 718 billion in 2008. Announcing this on day two of Gartner Summit India 2004, he also advised cellular operators to achieve higher ARPUs through data applications will require a change in mindset if they are to succeed in working with users and other players to develop compelling value propositions for consumers and enterprises.

 On the IT front Craig Baty, Group VP and Chief of Research, Gartner said that the domestic Indian market represents a huge untapped potential market for IT Services of which only $1.6 billion has been tapped "At a CAGR of 17.3 percent, India is expected to be the fastest growing IT services market in the region as compared to the global average of six percent, making it faster than its Asian counterparts including Singapore, China and Australia."

He emphasized on the fact that by 2008, Indian Domestic market will be almost 1.5 times the size of the Singaporean market. The growth will primarily be driven by government contracts, Banking Financial Services Industry and manufacturing sector, he added. The market is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of over 17.3 percent through to 2008.