Monday,
February 24, 2003
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Feature |
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For outsourcing, size
does matter
Rosemary Arackaparambil
A
fresh wave of foreign business is rolling in for India’s software
industry, where low salary costs and a skilled, English-speaking
workforce have made the country a world leader. But it’s the big
companies that stand to gain most.
India, the world’s
second most preferred destination for software outsourcing after
Ireland, has nearly 3,000 companies, but only five have revenue of over
$ 200 million and another 50 or so have revenue between $50 and 200
million.
"Today we’re
hearing that $1.2 billion of the top 25 deals worth $10 billion are
moving to India," Noshir Kaka, principal with McKinsey & Co,
told an industry seminar in Mumbai.
"Flight to scale for
large deals continues. The top five names are reputed and by nature
customers will go for larger companies with scale," he said.
Mahesh Vaze, analyst with
Refco Sify Securities, concurred. "Size has become important while
bidding for strategic outsourcing," he said. "And only a few
companies have that."
India’s top five
exporters, already working with Fortune 500 companies, are the unlisted
Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys Technologies, Wipro, Satyam Computer
Services and HCL Technologies.
Cost pressures and the
need to get more from every buck spent on technology are making
outsourcing to cheaper locations a strategic necessity.
"In the US, a bell
seems to have gone off. Offshore is in every single conversation about
outsourcing and most of the time that means India," Rita Terdiman,
vice-president of technology consultant U.S. Gartner Inc, says
Besides IT services, India
is also emerging as a destination of choice for outsourcing IT-enabled
services like call centres and business processes like payroll
processing and accounting.
Apart from Ireland and
India, other preferred places for software outsourcing are Israel,
Canada, the Philippines and South Africa. Data from India’s National
Association of Software and Services Companies shows the country has the
lowest average IT employee cost of just $5,880 per year.
The Philippines with
$6,800 per employee per year is closing in while most others are four to
five times more expensive.
China, Eastern Europe,
Russia, Asia-Pacific and South America are emerging offshore
destinations.
As the Indian business
matures, clients are getting choosier about whom they use, and for most
that means the big companies.
Top Indian firms are
looking for $50-100 million a year deals in areas like systems
integration and total software outsourcing, where the whole IT division
is given to a third party to manage.
Clients also want service
providers to have excess capacities at different places globally to
ensure business continuity.
After last year’s
military stand-off between India and Pakistan, which brought the
nuclear-armed rivals to the brink of war, the big companies are rushing
to reassure clients that they have a back-up location.
Infosys for instance, is
investing $25 million to set up a disaster recovery centre in Mauritius,
which will serve as an alternative location if work at other units gets
disrupted.
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