Source: www.hindu.com

London (IANS): In a reversal of the trend of British companies opening call centres in India, Tech Mahindra has decided to open one in Britain.

The Indian IT company, considered India’s sixth largest software exporter, will be opening the call centre at Jarrow, South Tyneside, and expects to create 500 jobs in three years.

“We are a global organisation. Our expansion plans are based on customer requirements. Here the customers and business opportunities coincided,” Mahesh Nagaraj, Tech Mahindra’s vice-president for strategic initiatives, was quoted as saying by The Financial Times during a visit to South Tyneside Friday.

The Tyneside regional development agency, One North East, will service the clients of Tech Mahindra. It will focus on delivering government sector services in application development and support and business processing outsourcing services.

One of its users will be British Telecom, which has a 35 percent stake in Tech Mahindra.

The Indian company already has five contact centres in Milton Keynes, Belfast and London.

Source: www.thehindubusinessline.com

New Delhi - The country’s services sector exports, including BPO, software and financial services exports, are likely to take a hit during the fourth quarter of 2008 on account of the ongoing global meltdown, a report by global research firm Deloitte has said.

“The ongoing slowdown in the US economy will likely to affect the future growth in India’s exports. Experts predict that US businesses would likely either reduce outsourcing or withhold expansion plans,” the report ‘Deloitte Global Economic Outlook’ for the fourth quarter of this year said.

As a result, BPOs, financial services and other software exports contributing to about 2 per cent of India’s GDP are likely to be affected, the report added.

The report said the country’s economic growth may fall by as much as 2 per cent over the next few years in the backdrop of the current financial crisis. “India will face slower growth prospects with analysts predicting a fall of as much as two percentage points over the next couple of years,” it said.

Source: sify.com

Bangalore: After streamlining its internal recruitment process, Bangalore-based IT consulting firm MindTree Ltd plans to add consulting in recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) to its existing service offerings.

“Although we have implemented RPO at MindTree for just about a year now and we are still in a pilot phase, we are confident that we have enough expertise to offer this as a niche consulting service to clients,” says Sanjay Shelvankar, Vice-President, Talent Acquisition, MindTree Ltd.

Though IT companies routinely advocate business process management, technology adoption and outsourcing to their clients, they lag behind in adopting the same internally, especially in the recruitment process, according to him.

MindTree’s Talent Acquisition division has designed and put in place an RPO that is scalable and can overcome the inefficiencies of the current recruiting system. The model also increases accountability towards results, reduce the cost per hire and effort per hire, says Shelvankar.

In 2007-08, for instance, MindTree hired 1,300 laterals, but had 60,000 people showing interest to join the company with over 165 vendors sending resumes for the jobs. With the industry’s track record of 15-18 per cent hit ratio, the IT company’s recruitment division had to grapple with risks such as wrong hires, delayed hires, no-shows and the associated costs with these.

MindTree now has an RPO vendor on premise working on contracts that are risk-reward types with payments tied to outcomes. “In fact, our cost per hire has now reduced from Rs 57,000 to Rs 41,000 after the RPO implementation,” he says.

With this experience, MindTree intends to offer consulting in the area for the IT industry and has identified a couple of ‘competent RPO providers’. Shelvankar says the company would initially tap MNCs with captive centres in India for the consulting business.

According to industry estimates, the current RPO market is around Rs 10,000 crore in India with HR companies offering RPO as one of their services.

Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

BANGALORE: Struggling British banks accepting a government bailout package will cut IT spending by up to a fifth and face pressure to move their offshore call centres in India and other countries back home, a UK-based research firm said.

British banks such as Barclays, Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which have accepted government cash to recapitalise, will halt spending on technology until the second quarter of 2009 and even cancel their offshore outsourcing programmes in pursuit of low-risk models, TowerGroup said. Such developments will be extremely bad news for India’s software vendors, for whom the UK is a key market.

According to industry estimates, India exported around $6 billion (Rs 29,000 crore) worth of software and BPO services to the UK during year-ended March 2008, accounting for some 15% of the country’s total software exports.

Lloyds has outsourcing deals with top Indian software vendors Wipro and Satyam Computer Services, while RBS counts among Infosys Technologies’ clients. Furthermore, both Barclays and RBS have captive offshore centres in India.

“National interest may result in the UK banks bringing their call centres back to Britain,” TowerGroup European research director Bob McDowall told ET.

“Banks which have substantial government shareholding will have to consider carefully not only the financial impact, but shareholder reaction if outsourcing and offshoring result in job losses in the UK,” he added. Out of a $792 billion bailout plan for the financial services sector, the British government is setting aside $79 billion to buy stakes in stricken banks.

The partial nationalisation is seen putting pressure on the banks to cut IT spending and reevaluate their offshore outsourcing plans. “One could see a reduction in overall IT spend in the financial services sector of 15-20% in 2009 compared with 2008,” Mr McDowall said. The financial crisis and the worsening economic situation are also triggering rate cuts for all new IT contracts being signed in the UK.

Many UK banks have asked their IT suppliers to take a rate cut of almost 12%. According to the Association of Technology Staffing Companies, hourly rates for IT projects in the UK have fallen to around $69, from $79 in the last quarter of 2007.

“The 12% slump is primarily due to new contracts being signed at lower rates rather than renegotiated deals,” a statement by the association said.

A situation akin to that in the UK might also develop in the US, spelling further trouble for Indian IT companies. The world’s largest economy is implementing a $700 billion financial bailout package of its own and accounts for nearly 60% of software exports from India. “There is already a noticeable freezing of spending on IT development, including suspension of non-critical projects (in the US),” Mr McDowall said.

Source: www.foxbusiness.com

CHARLOTTE, N.C. —-Level Four, the supplier of open standards-based ATM software, today announced a new global partnership with Polaris Software Lab Limited (POLS.BO), a provider of speciality application development and testing services in the banking, financial and insurance sectors. The agreement will enable financial institutions to benefit from a complete end-to-end outsourced testing solution, combining Level Four’s automated ATM testing application, BRIDGE:test, with Polaris’ testing services.

Customers who deploy BRIDGE:test as part of an outsourcing strategy with Polaris can achieve an optimal balance of cost and control as well as greater overall efficiency. Testing phases are shorter through a greater degree of automation and tests will be executed by testing professionals with specific ATM sector knowledge, according to a specially developed methodology by Polaris.

Capitalizing on the growing global trend to outsource ATM testing, Polaris has established centers of excellence for ATM testing in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Sydney, Australia and Toronto, Canada. As part of the PACE testing practice within Polaris, the need for specialist domain knowledge to handle complex ATM environments was considered essential.

Polaris has built up significant experience in application development, testing and deployment of ATM solutions for banks across the globe. By partnering with Level Four, Polaris will be able to service its clients with automated testing which offers faster and more accurate results, combating the challenge of more regular systems updates and software patches that modern, Windows-based ATMs demand.

Mr. Bikash Mathur, Partner & Head, EMEA, at Polaris said: “We see ATM testing as a huge growth market and a significant opportunity for us. Having built up a successful testing global practice in the financial services industry, we recognize the significant advantage that an automated testing tool could offer our customers. A key vision at Polaris is to partner with industry pioneers and we view Level Four as a leading player in the ATM testing market. With BRIDGE:test, Polaris’ specialist ATM staff will be able to give existing customers an improved offering and also attract new customers through the unique ability to combine faster deliverables with cost efficiencies.”

Ian Kerr, CEO, Level Four, said: “In the present market conditions, banks are increasingly looking to outsource to make operational efficiencies. ATM testing is a key area in a bank’s delivery channel strategy that can benefit from outsourcing. Under the agreement, Polaris test professionals will be certified to execute ATM testing plans using BRIDGE:test, enabling them to gain an advantage over their competitors by offering the benefits of automation in addition to those of outsourcing.”