The Hindu Business Line : Infosys BPO looks for rural partners

Bangalore, June 9 As part of its concerted bid to tap the rapidly growing domestic market, Infosys BPO, the back office outfit of Infosys Technologies Ltd proposes to tie-up with the rural BPOs, besides setting up a separate delivery team of 500 employees by the year-end to service the local market.

“We are in talks with the rural BPOs and have evaluated a couple of them,” said Mr Amitabh Chaudhry, Chief Executive Officer, Infosys BPO, stating that the “company would engage them on a need basis to service specific contracts”. Such an engagement with rural BPOs, which are located outside of large cities, is also expected to help Infosys bring in the multilingual capabilities and also service such portion of contracts, such as document scanning, that require basic skills.

Infosys will factor in the cost benefits of Rural BPO model in its pricing to the client, and will own the engagement and entire delivery (including that of Rural BPO). The pricing and revenue sharing will be worked on case-to-case basis, Mr Chaudhry said. Further, the kind of work that will be outsourced from the rural BPO would be of low to medium complexity, entailing low or no interaction with the client such as data processing work.

Infosys BPO has drawn up a broad strategy to address the Indian market and has identified about three to four areas to enhance its presence. As part of the strategy, the BPO outfit plans to work closely with the Systems Integration division of Infosys’ India Business Unit to pursue the IT-BPO deals.

Building interest

Besides, the BPO outfit would also be targeting the existing customers of Finacle, which commands a huge market share in India, Mr Chaudhry said. “We plan to have a team of some 500 people by the year-end to be located in Jaipur to service the domestic market,” he added.

The company also plans to target the large Indian corporates and multinationals with its specific shared services offerings, such as payroll processing, procurement among others. “Lot of Indian companies would be willing to work with us, considering our brand equity,” Mr Chaudhry said, adding that Infosys BPO was seeing lot of interest for its offerings from companies in the manufacturing, telecom and banking verticals.

Revenue flow

Infosys BPO expects revenues from the Indian market to flow next year. Currently, the BPO outfit does not derive any revenues from the Indian market, which accounts for 1.3 per cent of the Infosys’ overall revenues. The emergence of large deals from the Indian market in recent years has evoked interest from large players such as Infosys, Wipro and TCS, which are seeing a slower growth in their traditional markets — US and Europe, where customers are delaying their technology spends.

Further, Mr Chaudhry said the company would be aggressively using the technology platforms to service the Indian markets.

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