What started as back-office operations to support a few clients in the early 1980s, had become a full fledged industry in the late 1990s.
Currently around nine lakh people are employed by the Indian Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector . It generated revenues of $18 billion in 2012, and is expected to go up to $50 billion by 2020.
According to industry veterans, there are still untapped business opportunities. “The industry has expanded nicely; the 10-15 per cent growth (year-on-year) is good for the industry. The quality and complexities of the BPO industry are quite interesting because of the value-add services to sectors such as banking, finance, retail and manufacturing,” Pramod Bhasin, Non-Executive Vice-Chairman and former President and Chief Executive Officer of Genpact, told
Tech developments
Raman Roy, one of the founders of the BPO industry and now Chairman and Managing Director, Quattrro, said that the industry has grown beyond labour arbitrage.
“It is no more one-for-one (a company serving only one client). The technology deployments that are happening today are also large,” he said. Going forward, the industry will see the emergence of new verticals such as public sector and healthcare, customer segments such as SMBs due to increased connectivity and geographies such as India due to economic growth.
“Over the next decade, several global mega-trends are expected to shape the technology and BPM (Business Process Management) industry as they reshape the global economy.
There will be opportunities for companies to capture new markets largely untapped so far,” Hanumant Talwar, Managing Director and Country Manager, Convergys India and UK, said. However, there are also challenges, the biggest being availability of skilled people.
“Unavailability of industry-ready graduates within the country is a war for talent, for which the education system in India has to be given a complete facelift,” Keshav R. Murugesh, Chief Executive Officer, WNS Global Services, said.
Murugesh, who is also the Chairman of Nasscom’s BPM forum, said that from simple voice-based back-office work to high-end knowledge work, outsourcing companies now recruit chartered accountants, engineers, doctors and many other such professionals.