Nipuna: Celebrating Excellence

Nipuna, the BPO arm of Satyam, is the world's first BPO
services company to achieve eSCM-SP Capability Level 4 Certification. Its
computing environment is based on the Microsoft platform, while its backend ERP
runs on People Soft Oracle platform on Sun Solaris. From the telecom
infrastructure perspective, Nipuna uses communication link IPLC at multiple
locations in Hyderabad and Bangalore, which is going to multiple points of
presence in the US. "This is called Ring Topology that is connecting points
on sequential basis for ensuring optimum availability of the telecom
network," says Debashis Singh, vice president, Network and Systems.
Elaborating more on Nipuna's IT infrastructure, Singh says that for thwarting
threats to network security, Nipuna has installed various checkpoints like
Intrusion Detection System, anti-virus etc, and the network meanwhile is managed
by HP Open View.

With the rapid change in technology, Nipuna, since its inception
three years back, has gone for several upgradation as per the business
requirements. "We do not simply copy trends, and all our infrastructure
upgradation have been driven by business requirements for maintaining
availability and reliability of network and confidentiality of data,"
reasons Singh.

	"We do not simply copy trends, and all our infrastructure upgradation have been driven by business requirements for maintaining availability and reliability of network and confidentiality of data"
	-Debashis Singh, VP, Network and Systems

Real Time Need

The level of IT adoption in Nipuna, therefore, is high mainly because the
BPO industry runs in real time environment and runs purely on the IT
infrastructure. "We have the best of class infrastructure and the adoption
is latest for ensuring current business requirements," claims Singh. The
Nipuna management, which essentially focuses on ensuring best practices approach
for meeting the market and customer expectations, automating every process,
believes in first creating world class infrastructure. "Our management
believes in thinking, investing and then creating new infrastructure and then
going back to the clients," he says.

Beginning of the Road

Upgrading the IT infrastructure is a journey in itself and is not the end of
road for them, says Singh. The average Indian BPO faces a lot of challenges when
it comes to its IT infrastructure. First and foremost is information security
and in Nipuna's case, they convince the clients that their network is secure
with no past instances of breaches. "Another challenge for us is automation
in terms of saving time and creating additional productive minutes every hour by
every agent meaning that agents do not have to spend critical time in creating
reports since all of the MIS tools are automated and report generation is done
through IT," Singh explains. The availability and reliability of network is
another challenge that is giving sleepless nights to the BPOs as "more and
more customers are demanding it, and it is now an urgent requirement to enhance
network for creating a customer experience."

Singh has major issues with the telecom service providers, which
he believes, are "not of international standards", and even the
government regulatory standards are a major impediment to the growth of the
Indian BPOs. "For instance, the government has not permitted accessing of
BPO network from home leading to a lot of infrastructure maintenance
issues," he says.

"For sometime we will be focused on being compliant as per
international standards and in achieving this, IT will play a major role. The
other major area for Nipuna will be automating the management of the lifecycle
of an associate," Singh says. Elaborating on this, he says that currently,
it is a challenge to manage the complete lifecycle of an associate in which
30-40% of the time goes in managing the transport, logistics and IT of the
associate. "Our focus, therefore, would be to automate this entire process
which will ensure 100% compliance with the same time being used productively
elsewhere."

Stuti Das

stutid@cybermedia.co.in