Global BPO vendors poach staff from Indian firms

Bangalore: In the last few months, global outsourcing vendors such as Accenture and Capgemini have poached about a dozen top professionals from Indian companies like TCS, Wipro and Infosys.

Padmanabhan Ananthanarayanan, who headed India's largest software exporter TCS' sales organization in Europe until February this year, joined Accenture in March as Director of its outsourcing business based in Germany. Shishir Kumar and Vikas Baranwal quit TCS earlier this year to join Accenture as Sales Directors, Nimit Chawal and Dev Sharma joined Capgemini to lead the company's sales team. Sharma headed Wipro's business development and account management for manufacturing and automotive customers in Germany until December last year, before becoming Director, Business Development for Central Europe at Capgemini.

Sridhar Vedala, Managing Director of offshoring advisory firm Quantum Step says, "Global service providers are hiring more Indian professionals to influence the perception of customers who are looking at India and Indian professionals as synonyms for offshore outsourcing."

Offshore outsourcing or remote delivery of software application development, maintenance and support from countries like India helps customers such as GE and Citibank to save up to 40 percent in costs. Indian companies such as TCS, Wipro and Infosys started using offshore outsourcing to their advantage around a decade ago by wooing customers with significant cost-benefits.

A Senior Executive of an Indian tech firm says that many outsourcing dialogues these days are being spearheaded by Indian offshore delivery managers, unlike in the past, when local experts would help them gain access to a potential customer. The chief information officers are specifically asking for Indian suppliers.

The over $40-billion Indian software outsourcing industry derives almost 70-80 percent of its revenues from offshore outsourcing. While established outsourcing vendors, such as IBM and Accenture, still lead the market because of their early relationships and 'onshore intimacy' with large customers, several new outsourcing customers are now looking at pure offshoring, which is helping the Indian vendors.

Hema Ravichander, who was the Head of Human Resources at Infosys and is now an independent consultant, says that Indian professionals are highly valued because of their early offshoring experience.