Source: www.marketwire.com

HCL Technologies Ltd. (”HCL”), leading global IT services company, has entered into a global consulting partnership with Visiprise, Inc. for the Life Sciences industry, covering all aspects of the medical device manufacturing cycle. Visiprise provides manufacturing execution solutions (MES) that help global manufacturers to gain visibility into operations, achieve shop floor control and manage product and process traceability. The consulting agreement will include joint marketing, sales and pre-sales services and will result in the ability for seamless licensing, blueprinting, implementation, plant-business integration, roll-out, support, upgrade / migration and instance consolidation services to manufacturers.

The strategic partnership will further strengthen HCL’s position as “innovators/leaders” in the Manufacturing IT landscape with initial focus on medical devices further expanding to Hitech, Aerospace, Auto and other discrete industries. Under this agreement Visiprise will also be training and certifying HCL consultants on Visiprise solutions.

Speaking on the occasion Mr. Pradep Nair, VP, Global Life Sciences and Healthcare practice, HCL Technologies, said, “With increasing global competition, it is imperative for manufacturers to innovate faster, cheaper, with sustained/better quality meeting stringent regulatory norms. Manufacturers are therefore making strategic investments in comprehensive IT solutions focused towards improving efficiency in the plant operations and increasing collaboration between engineering, enterprise and plant functions as well as extended eco systems such as partners and suppliers. HCL’s partnership with Visiprise is well poised in bringing about the transformational change in plant operations. We believe that Visiprise’s technology and strategic alignment with SAP and PLM vendors will help customers in seamless business integration from shop-floor to top-floor, which aligns well with HCL’s focus towards Manufacturing IT solutions and services.”

“HCL’s focus in medical devices, coupled with their comprehensive approach in providing total plant-level IT aligns well with our vision of delivering a total manufacturing solution for the integrated enterprise,” said Mike Lacky, Vice President of industry business units from Visiprise. “HCL Technologies has a global footprint and a proven ability to deliver solutions in a complex, manufacturing environment.”

Commenting on the partnership, Ralph Rio, Director ARC Advisory, remarks, “Among the discrete industries, the competitive landscape today demands a speed of execution that is driving the adoption of MES applications like Visiprise. In addition, electronic records provided by MES applications are needed for compliance with US FDA regulations. Our research shows rapid MES market growth that recently reached 27% year-to-year. The HCL and Visiprise partnership helps fill this major market opportunity with software and support for the lifecycle of a MES project.” The ARC Advisory Group is a leading research, advisory firm and the thought leaders in manufacturing, logistics and supply chain solutions.

Source: www.law.com

Outsourcing legal work to India is no longer a novelty. It’s a reality.

At least that is the message of legal process outsourcing (LPO) companies participating in their first major industry summit, held last week in New York. Buoyed by Forrester Research projections that $4 billion in legal work may head to India by 2015, a growing number of companies are angling for a piece of the action.

But despite the hoopla, industry leaders acknowledge legal outsourcing remains very much in its infancy, with fundamental choices still being made about how to market the services of Indian lawyers. Is it just about cost? Or can Indian lawyers actually do many things better than their American counterparts? Should outsourcing firms seek to wholly supplant other service providers or cooperate with them?

Cost certainly first sparks customers’ interest in the Indian option, said David Perla, co-founder of New York-based Pangea3, probably the largest LPO company with 240 lawyers in three Mumbai offices. Perla, the former general counsel of job search Web site Monster, noted that legal departments in companies already outsourcing other functions to India face particular pressure to look at similar cost-saving measures.

The good experiences that some clients have had with legal outsourcing has led to many other companies being receptive to the idea, said Perla. He declined to name any clients but said they included some of the 10 largest companies in the Fortune 500.

“The resistance level has gone way down,” he said.

Legal process outsourcing vendors target the more mundane but nonetheless time-intensive tasks associated with legal practice, reviewing mountains of documents for discovery rather than drafting appellate briefs. Once the province of junior associates, such work is now more commonly handled by domestic staffing agencies fielding large teams of temporary attorneys.

LPO salaries for Indian lawyers are generally well below $10,000 a year. By comparison, a U.S. contract lawyer usually earns around $30 an hour while associate base salaries at major firms in New York start at $160,000 a year.

But the math is not that simple. Maintaining a group of lawyers in India imposes significant infrastructure costs on the outsourcing companies. Aside from office space and computers, the leading companies also have U.S.-trained lawyers working in both India and the United States to supervise the work of Indian staff. They also maintain client development teams to market services to U.S. companies.

Such costs explain why outsourcing companies usually charge clients around $30 an hour, lower than what a U.S. staffing agency would generally charge but not by the magnitude simple labor-cost arbitrage would suggest.

Price is not ultimately where Pangea3 wants to compete though. Perla is forthright in stating his belief that Pangea3 does better work.

The only lawyers who work for staffing agencies, said Perla, “are the ones who couldn’t make it as real lawyers.”

In his view, the temporary lawyers typically hired to perform document review on major litigation have minimal skills and zero motivation. In contrast, Pangea3 can attract the best and the brightest young lawyers in India, fluent in English and trained in English common law. Perla said clients have held “bake-offs” in which the Pangea3’s Indian lawyers were asked to perform the same tasks as U.S. contract lawyers. He said the Indians soundly trounced the Americans.

Pangea3 has attracted significant backing for its ambitious vision. Two years after its 2004 founding, the company garnered a $4.4 million investment by GlenRock Capital, the fund headed by former top private equity lawyer Lawrence G. Graev, who now serves as Pangea3’s nonexecutive chairman. Last year, the company scored a $7 million investment by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, which also helped shepherd Yahoo, PayPal and YouTube.

ONSHORE OPTION

New York-based Quislex, another leading LPO company, with around 130 lawyers in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, has taken a slightly different tack. The largely self-funded company last year entered a joint venture with Strategic Legal Solutions, a leading domestic contract attorney agency. The venture, called SQ Global Solutions, markets offshore and onshore outsourcing options together.

Ram Vasudevan, the chief executive officer of Quislex and a onetime Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom associate, said there are some tasks for which Indian outsourcing may be appropriate but other tasks for which U.S. contract lawyers may be better suited.

“There can be parallel teams working in the U.S. and India,” said Vasudevan. “There are no hard-and-fast rules.”

He said U.S. clients may favor domestic contract lawyers for work involving highly restricted data, for which proximity may be important, as well as upper-level tasks like drafting documents. But he thinks Indian lawyers may appeal to clients that are seeking stable, long-term teams to work on their matters. Compared with U.S. staffing agencies, turnover at legal outsourcing firms is quite low, he said.

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