Dataquest Domestic Outsourcing Summit 2009 : On-demand, in Demand

Theres a marked change visible within the Indian market as it has become lot
more mature over the years. The Indian CIOs are becoming far more receptive to
the idea of outsourcing, more than in any other emerging market in the world.
However, for many of them, it is not just a West-like cost reduction in legacy
infrastructure that they are looking at. Many of them want to access new
technology, but in a derisked manner. That has made the on-demand model an
increasingly favorite model among them.

The two-city Dataquest Domestic Outsourcing Summit 2009: Opportunities &
Challenges in Customer Service & IT Outsourcing, presented by Tata
Communications, tried to look at the various challenges and opportunities that
are associated with the hosted/on-demand model in IT, with special focus on
infrastructure management, CRM, and contact centers. In the first of the two
part series, we present here the major points that emanated from the discussion
organized on June 5, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency, New Delhi.

The forum, one of the rare platforms that dealt on the subject so thoroughly,
saw participation from about twenty stakeholders including fifteen heads of
technologies/CIOs.

The forum provided CIOs with a platform to discuss opportunities and challenges in the on-demand model

The discussion was preceded by presentation from all Tata Communications
represetatives.

With the boom in Indian economy, domestic businesses have been growing in
size as well as geographical spread. This has given rise to the need for various
outsourced services in order to get an optimized business process solution and
client servicing. Theres huge transformation that has happened in the domestic
market as its growing rapidly, and two key growth drivers are the Telecom and
BFSI verticals; its basically the services vertical that is driving the
outsourcing business, said Yazad Boga, head hosted contact center services,
Global Enterprise Solutions, Tata Communications, Although costing will remain
a challenge for the players offering hosted solutions in the domestic market,
yet the growing maturity of Indian businesses have now started to understand the
advantage of hosted services and the demand for such service is going to
leapfrog in the near future, he added.

As the service providers today are offering various pay-as-you-use model with
scalability options, the Indian CIOs can start evaluating the benefits
associated with on-demand model, especially in a challenging economic scenario
since it definitely helps businesses to save plenty of cost. For any new IT
investment the CIOs can either look for managed hosting services, or for any
additional requirement they can seek individual component hosting options from
the service providers that are available today as well, said Simon Robin of
Tata Communications.

(1) & (2) Panelists engrossed in some serious discussion about the challenges and opportunities in the on-demand model

One of the key reasons behind the transformation is of course the success of
the concept of software as a service (SaaS) model. The customers are not only
using it as a platform for ready services but also looking to use this as a
platform to build their own services and offer them to their clients. The
customers now have become more articulate about cost effectiveness rather than
costing, and they are now willing to outsource their business and looking for an
end-to-end solution. One of the key reasons is the maturity that has come into
managed services and solutions offered by various service providers; its not
just limited to managing the contact center, but the capability has now been
built to provide advance services like managing the bandwidth (managed MPLS) as
well, observed Sunil Gujral, executive vice president, Quatrro BPO.

As domestic businesses are growing and spreading out to multiple locations,
need for hosted contact centers is growing. It is important therefore, for the
service providers to offer seamless and effective solutions to their customers
that are both cost effective as well as flexible. Our customers are outsourcing
their business processes and in turn we are outsourcing our processes to a
third-party in order to deliver seamless services to our customers. Therefore,
we need to get a full-proof solution in order to offer our customers the same.
Since hosting allows contact centers like us to access technology without the
need to build or purchase the required infrastructure, the hosted model works
well as it means plenty of cost saving and flexibility too. Therefore, more and
more companies are now looking for hosted contact centers, explained SV Ramana
, CTO, Genpact.

Explaining further the need for a wholesome and flexible hosted solution
Gopalakrishnan S, VP-technology, IBM Daksh said, Customers in the domestic
market are today very clear of their requirements and what they want to
outsource. The service providers therefore, have to come out with more effective
and flexible solutions based on the on-demand model to cater to the diverse
needs of the domestic market, which is evolving and growing at a very rapid
pace.

Most CIOs agreed that going forward, the on-demand model that provides a
convenient way to scale up IT would pick up rapidly.

Piyali Guha

piyalig@cybermedia.co.in