Outsourcing: West Corporation Interview (Part 3)

By guest author Tony Scott New Offshore Centers For BPO? Tony: Are you looking at the virtual model outside of the United States as well, or do you do pure brick-and-mortar offshore? Matt: We have discussed it, but we haven’t pursued it at this point.

Outsourcing: West Corporation Interview (Part 2)

By guest author Tony Scott The Home Agent Advantage Tony: You mentioned that you believe you are able to provide a total cost of service at a lower rate using the home agent model versus the brick-and-mortar model?Compared to domestic brick-and-mortar call centers, what percentage differential do you typically find?

Smartphone Ecosystem (Part 3): Devices

By Guest Author Nalini Kumar Muppala The next three posts in the series focus on the hardware components of smartphones. Let’s now take a look at some of the flagship devices from major handset vendors. Getting under the hoods of these devices will give us a reasonable idea as to which handset chip providers are

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Outsourcing: West Corporation Interview (Part 1)

The Future of Call Centers Last week I talked about the double-edged sword facing outsourcing companies that are playing a pure labor arbitrage game because of lower cost of communications and the potential to virtualize call centers. This week I’d like to share with you some of my interview with several senior executives from a

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Smartphone Ecosystem (Part 2): Profitability

By guest author Nalini Kumar Muppala So, what makes smartphone an attractive business to be in? In short, smartphones, at least so far, have been a high-profit business. Consider Apple, RIM, and Nokia. While Apple and RIM are pure-play (as far as phones go) smartphone makers, Nokia makes phones that serve customers across the entire

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What Do I Need From An Incubator?

By guest author Nari Kannan As an entrepreneur, what do I need from an incubator? Of late, there has been a lot of discussion in this forum about incubators, what measures they use for their own success, their business models, and so forth. In this post I discuss five things that I, as an entrepreneur, need

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Is Outsourcing Dying Or Thriving? (Part 4)

By guest author Tony Scott The Double-Edged Sword: The Flat World A few years ago Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” became a global best seller. One of that book’s key areas of focus was examining the immense change that lower-cost, effective global communications was causing by enabling back-office call centers and IT support work

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Jeff Saperstein

Jeff Saperstein is an author, teacher, consultant, and enabler in how technology can be used to create growth in regional economic development and success for organizations. His just-released book with co-author Hunter Hastings is Bust the Silos: Opening Your Organization for Growth. His books and case studies are focused upon best practices for innovation. “Toyota: Driving the

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