Outsourcing: Matthew Heim, President of NineSigma (Part 1)

Do you have a problem you can’t solve and can’t find anyone anywhere in your organization who can solve it? There’s no app for that, but there is a company that can put you in touch with a host of people with the knowledge and experience needed to help you. No matter what industry you’re in, NineSigma can connect you with the right people to answer questions and spark innovation. Founded in 2000, NineSigma is a global company based in Cleveland, Ohio, with additional headquarters in Leuven, Belgium, Tokyo, and Melbourne. The company also has a presence in South America and Africa. >>>

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Outsourcing: Manish Dugar, Senior VP And Global Head Of Wipro BPO (Part 1)

From its humble beginnings as a consumer products business in 1945, Wipro has become a global company that serves customers in IT, BPO and R&D. Although its headquarters remain in Bangalore, India, Wipro has expanded its service horizons to include, North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia.  >>>

Outsourcing: Ravi Pandit, Chairman And Group CEO, KPIT Cummins (Part 1)

About KPIT Cummins
A public company listed on the BSE and NSE, KPIT Cummins helps clients to develop domain-based intensive technology solutions for manufacturing corporations with special focus on automotive, transportation & manufacturing, energy & utilities, and defense & government.

About Ravi Pandit
After studying at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Ravi Pandit began his career as an accountant. He has spent more than three decades in information technology and, with his team, has built KPIT Cummins.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Ravi, and welcome to the Outsourcing series. If you would, please set some context for our readers and me about KPIT Cummins. We don’t know that much about the company, so we need to understand first what you do, what your business is, where you are, what size you are, the scale of your operations, and so on. >>>

Technology Balance Beam: Balancing Internal and Outsourced Tasks

A guest post by Shane Caniglia  

Marketing requirements and customer experience are driving the necessity for innovation and speed in our ever-changing business environment of delivering financial education. Right now, there are many simultaneously interlocking elements in development: Web initiatives and analysis, data capture and management, social media, and mobile applications. I consider these 5 key points when juggling multiple but equal priorities: >>>

Outsourcing: PV Kannan, CEO Of 24/7 (Part 1)

Sramana Mitra: Hi PV, welcome to the Outsourcing series. Would you start by introducing the company?

PV Kannan: Sure. I will start by describing how the company was founded and what led to the creation of it, would that be helpful?

SM: That would be perfect. >>>

Near-shoring And U.S. Policy

Last month, I had breakfast with Scott Case, CEO of Startup America, and we then started working with the organization.

Here is my recent guest column for Startup America. One thought that has come to me frequently is that the U.S. is simply not doing enough to take advantage of the nearshore outsourcing trend that has been developing for natural, organic reasons. >>>

Outsourcing: Lalit Dhingra, President Of NIIT Technologies (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

About NIIT Ltd and NIIT Technologies
NIIT began an education company in the area of IT and was early proponent of IT and IT-enabled services in India. Later, it moved ahead in the outsourcing field with a backward integrated setup. Over two and a half decades, the company has expanded to multiple locations. NIIT Technologies became an independent organization in 2004.

About Lalit Dhingra
Lalit Dhingra is the president of NIIT Technologies. He began with NIIT in 1991 and is responsible for building the North American operations for NIIT Technologies. He heads the North American balance sheet and aims to build innovative business models in the technology outsourcing space such that NIIT Technologies can continue to enjoy the consistent double-digit growth it has had in the past five years.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, and welcome to the Outsourcing series. Let’s start with giving readers some perspective about NIIT Technologies, your business, how the business is from a revenue the point of view, an employee point of view, a geography point of view, a business point of view, and so on. How is the business set up? >>>

Trend: SaaS-enabled BPO

Otherwise known as technology-enabled service, the practice of offering not only software as a service, but also the people who can execute on those services with specialized skills and training, is becoming increasingly prevalent.

This gives rise to a new breed of outsourcing: highly specialized, high value, and differentiated outsourcing with interesting technology nuances. The best-known examples of truly large companies built on this model are ADP and Paychex. Now, however, I see a new trend developing along these lines.
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Outsourcing: Chris Coles, President And CEO Of HyperQuality (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

About HyperQuality
HyperQuality is an independent quality assurance company with operations in the United States and India. Founded in 2003, the company uses customer satisfaction as a means to retain existing customers and acquire new ones. It does this by listening to customer–agent interactions, rating them, and giving feedback to clients on which policies or practices should stay and which ones should go. It delivers this intelligence through a SaaS tool called ClearMetrix. HyperQuality is a roughly $11 million company that has approximately 600 employees in both countries. It has served such clients as AOL, Travelocity, Guthy-Renker, and SkyMall.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Chris. Welcome to the Outsourcing series. Would you tell us a bit about HyperQuality to set the context of the conversation.

Chris Coles: Sure. HyperQuality is a company that is a little more than eight years old, and it started from a position of providing cost-effective, higher quality or more reliable, more objective tiers of agent performance. Typically, it’s measured to quality attributes that were held or managed by people in the contact center. That is really the roots of the business. Over the past eight years, it has evolved, as the market has evolved, to work on software solutions for management and workflow, and providing more process and consistency within the context of evaluation. It has also moved from call evaluation and agent evaluation into caller contact effectiveness. It plays to a larger audience within a company as to what exactly is being said by customers. It’s sort of a “voice of the customer” agenda to where is it in the offer or in the PO service or in pricing or in policy that is causing topics of concern or rejection on the part of customer or prospects? So, it is a fairly systematic approach that we take to really evaluating what is going on inside the calls and making that information relevant to a wide array of stakeholders within an enterprise or within a company. >>>

Outsourcing: Ankur Prakash, Vice President And COO, TCS Latin America (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

About Ankur Prakash
Ankur Prakash has worked for TCS for more than 16 years and specializes in strategy formulation and execution, IT services, BPO, and consulting. He attended the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, and Harvard Business School.

About Tata Consultancy Services in Latin America
TCS Mexico began operations in Mexico City in 2003 and provides specialized IT services, consulting, testing, software development, business processes outsourcing (BPO), contact center, IT infrastructure solutions, industrial and engineering services and solutions. It now has headquarters Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Major clients include Aeromexico, IMSS, Bank of America, GE, JCI, Ceridian, Verizon, Banco Santander, BAC Credomatic, Inter-American Development Bank, Banamex, and América Móvil.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Ankur, welcome to the Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series. I know you are based in Latin America, running TCS in this region. Would you please give us an overview about the business in outsourcing series context?

Ankur: Hi, Sramana. We implemented our Latin American strategy way back in 2002. Before that we were doing a lot of business within Latin American countries, but this was all either through India or through the U.S. After 2002 we established a local presence, and we are currently in eight countries covering more than 90% of the total GDP of Latin America. Through these local companies, we want to not only tap the local domestic and regional markets, also we want play  an important role in global strategy through our global network delivery model. We are the pioneers in this particular industry anyway. >>>

Outsourcing: César Gon, Founder And CEO, CI&T (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

About César Gon
Brazilian software entrepreneur César Gon has been a key player in several initiatives to promote excellence in software development. Under Gon’s leadership, CI&T’s roster of services has grown to also include business intelligence, SAP consulting, and digital marketing. The company has developed solutions for major global companies such as Coca-Cola, Google, Nestlé, and Honda.

About Ci&T
Based in São Paulo, Brazil, CI&T delivers consulting, application outsourcing and digital marketing services. It CI&T specializes in customized application development, business intelligence, SAP consulting, digital marketing and Web 2.0 applications. Its clients include a diverse array of large and global Fortune 500 customers in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Europe, Japan and China.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, César. Welcome to the Outsourcing series. To begin, would you tell us a bit about CI&T so that our readers have some context about the company and what it does? What kind of clients do you service, what kind of processes we are talking about? After that we will go into more detail. >>>

Outsourcing: Martin Migoya, CEO Of Globant (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Rajesh Nair and Aditya Modi

About Martin Migoya

Martin Migoya is the CEO of Globant. Together with three of his friends, Martin established Globant, a company that desgins software products. Under Martin’s leadership, Globant grew from four people in 2003 to 1,500 today. He has won many awards such as Endeavour Entrepreneur 2005, Konex Award for the most innovative entrepreneurs of 2008, and Security Award for the most distinguished businessmen of the year in 2009.

About Globant
The fastest-growing software firm in Latin America, Globant, has become one of the top 10 software development companies in the world  since its inception just over seven years ago. With more than 2,500 employees it is headquartered in Buenos Aires and has offices in the U.S., U.K., Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and all over  Argentina. Globant’s clients range from software development and infrastructure management  to mobile applications and e-commerce. Globant has won awards for its innovation and its delivery model.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Martin, and welcome to the Outsourcing series. To start with, we are definitely seeing outsourcing in Latin America as a major trend, which is why I wanted to speak with you. I would like to understand more about what you are seeing and how you are navigating your way through the outsourcing industry.

Martin Migoya: OK.

SM: So, let’s start with some background on Globant. Would you please tell me more about how and when you started and how you have built a sizeable company to this point. >>>

Latin America Startups: How Three Sourcing Entrepreneurs Crossed the Chasm

Outsourcing: Sandip Sen, President And CMO, Aegis (Part 1)

About Sandip Sen

Sandip Sen is president (Americas) and chief marketing officer of Aegis. He was the founder CEO and COO of Customer First Services, which was formed as a result of a management buyout in 2001. During his tenure at Customer First Services, it became one of India’s largest domestic call center companies with 1,400 seats across six locations, and employed more than 2,000 people. In January 2006, Customer First Services became a part of Aegis.

Prior to founding Customer First Services, Sen worked in senior management positions in the FMCG and telecom sectors. He was the head of marketing and later network head at Hutchison Paging. Mr Sen has an honors degree in economics from the Presidency College (Calcutta, India) and a master’s degree in business administration from the Xavier Labor Relations Institute (Jamshedpur, India). He also teaches MBA students Consumer Behavior at the Xavier Institute of Management and Entrepreneurship (Bangalore, India).

About Aegis

Aegis provides back office support, back office outsourcing, and global outsourcing. Several Fortune 500 clients have chosen Aegis to manage their customer interaction, back office, and other routine business processes. It serves clients in a variety of industries, including banking and financial services, travel and hospitality, auto and manufacturing, technology, and retail, among others.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Sandip, and welcome to the Outsourcing series. To set the context, would you give us some background on Aegis. When was the company founded? Where is it headquartered? Where was it founded? What is the genesis of the company? >>>

Outsourcing: Joe Lawler, Chairman, President And CEO Of ModusLink (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

About Joseph C. Lawler
Joe Lawler is ModusLink Global Solutions’ chairman, president and CEO, with executive leadership responsibility for the vision, strategic direction, and performance of ModusLink Global Solutions and its subsidiaries. As CEO, Lawler oversees cross-company operations, financial management, and strategy implementation.

Prior to joining the company in August 2004, Lawler was executive vice-president at RR Donnelley (RRD), an $8 billion global printer with 30,000 employees. At RRD, he was responsible for seven business units as well as the corporation’s government affairs and corporate marketing efforts. During his 10 years with the company, Lawler succeeded in diversifying RRD’s business portfolio and driving growth through his integrated solutions approach. He was also known for his work designing RRD’s executive talent committee, global leadership team, and officer development program. >>>