Source: www.cxotoday.com

New Horizons, the IT training company, has announced that it will offshore global content development to the Indian joint venture. New Horizons India (NH India) will create content for internal training material that will be used in sixty countries across the globe. It will also offer the same services to both Indian and global customers who require customized content. This marks New Horizons’ foray into the content development space that until now, it had outsourced to vendors in the US.

Speaking on the subject Ajay Sharma, President and CEO of New Horizons India said, “We believe that the market for content outsourcing is a US $ 1 billion opportunity worldwide, and we are confident that New Horizons India will be able to leverage their expertise in technical training as well as the strong Indian intellectual resource pool to capture a significant share of this market. In fact we expect to undertake exports of US $ 1 million within this financial year.”

To execute the business, New Horizons India is likely to invest an initial US $ 10 million over the next 3 years. New Horizons will set up a 13,000 sq ft. state of the art development centre with 200 content writers in the first phase. By the end of 2009, New Horizons India will increase this headcount to 1000, taking its overall staff strength to over 3000 in India.

With innovation driving global technology change more rapidly than ever before and businesses IT adoption cycle down to 3 years from 5 a decade ago, the need for content in the IT space alone is overwhelming. It ranges from user manuals to internal technical guides, process manuals etc. Added to this is the opportunity in the internal communications arena that is also fast becoming a specialist field.

“And this is just the beginning of the consolidation possibility in the hitherto fragmented arena of content development. Knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) will be the key growth driver in the global outsourcing opportunity, and India is perfectly suited to leverage this trend to accelerate its positioning as the global knowledge hub,” added Sharma.

The content development center, based in Noida will provide content for over 500 titles, spanning both IT and non-IT segments. The former includes instructor led proprietary course material, technical documentation, user manuals and e-learning material while the latter includes content for K12 segment text books and career development programs in the non-IT space as well as customized content for internal customers of fortune 500 companies. To begin with, the titles will be developed in English, but going forward NH India plans to add multilingual capabilities too.

The KPO industry in India is now big business and India is no longer just a hub for cost-effective, english-speaking ‘bodies’. It is emerging as a goldmine for high-level skills, too. KPO outfits are helping global firms’ source high-skilled work out of India in a cost-effective and efficient manner. According to industry estimates KPOs in India will grow to US $12 billion by 2010 from US $0.72 billion in 2003. There will be over 2.5 lakh KPO professionals by 2010 compared to the current figure of 25,000 (source: Evalueserve).

Source:www.business-standard.com

Spanco Telesystems and Solutions is poised to invest over Rs 400 crore in its Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) operations, over two years.

The company plans to set up facilities across cities including Chennai, Jaipur, Mysore, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Noida.

The company today announced its foray into the domestic BPO market. Spanco has set up two flagship customer support centres, one each in Gurgaon and Mumbai, to provide back office and contact centre services to domestic clients.

The company is looking to service industries such as financial services, insurance, telecom, entertainment, retail and hospitality in India.

Spanco’s new centres will be spread over 2 lakh square feet with a capacity of 2,200 seats. The company aims to increase the capacity to 15,000 seats with over 25,000 employees by financial year 2009.

In its first phase of the expansion, Spanco’s BPO arm is expected to employ around 5,000 employees. The company currently employs over 3,000 people in its BPO.

Commenting on Spanco’s entry into the domestic BPO space, Sandeep Soni, executive director and chief executive officer, Spanco BPO, said, “We believe this is the best time to enter the domestic BPO market, given the huge emerging opportunities within the country. Given Spanco’s erstwhile experience in the domestic space and proven technology competency, we will seek to differentiate ourselves by providing complete BPO and end-to-end strategic outsourcing solutions for organisations in India.”

Spanco BPO has set up call centres for many government enterprises including BSNL and MTNL.

Key services at the BPO include outbound and inbound sales, customer service and collections as well as back-office functions such as e-mail response.

Spanco also has an international call centre with a presence in India, the UK and West Asia.