Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Jay Leader CIO, Of iRobot (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Product life cycle management is an area we haven’t heard so much about in our cloud computing series. We haven’t really heard much from that field. I worked a lot in that area in the early part of the past decade because I was doing a turnaround of a company that did PLM and mechanical design software. They were called Think3; you may have heard of them.

What is happening in PLM today? How these trends are affecting the product life management cycle? For instance, does social media have some impact on your product design life cycle or your innovation life cycle?

Jay Leader: Not particularly. I mean, I would say no and I know you would rather than I say yes, but …

SM: Oh, no! I would rather you say what you feel is true; I don’t need to hear anything that is not accurate. >>>

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 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana Mitra: So, did I hear you right that the one program that India implemented incredibly successfully in the early days of outsourcing was to give the industry a tax breaks, which is not the Latin American strategy, from a development point of view?

Ankur Prakash: I don’t want to comment on whether it was a good program by India; that is not my area. What I can say is that in Latin America they do not have tax-free zones, but there is a lot of other support from the government, from physically finding an office to how to open a company to assistance with talent, resources, training, and capital expenditure. >>>

Latin America Rising

I have been interested in Latin America for more than 15 years, although my involvement with business in the region started only in 2007, when I visited Buenos Aires for a client engagement. Since then, I have closely followed the ever-growing reach of MercadoLibre, Latin America’s e-commerce leader, in the form of an interview with founder Marcos Galperin and regular Tech Stocks coverage. >>>

Outsourcing: Ankur Prakash, Vice President And COO, TCS Latin America (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana Mitra: In terms of dynamics of geography, in India, for example, we see that the big cities where the outsourcing industry really got started and matured such, as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, New Delhi, Gurgaon, and Noida, have become very expensive, and companies like yours are actually moving out to second- and third-tier cities. What is the parallel scenario in Latin America? Are we still in the major capitals like the Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio, and Santiago, or is it a more distributed model? >>>

Outsourcing: Ankur Prakash, Vice President And COO, TCS Latin America (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana: And how big a factor is language in your work in Latin America?

Ankur: For global customers, all the people whom we recruit are bilingual, so more than 90% of the people are bilingual. We ensure that all these employees are continuously in touch with the English language. We keep employees who are not working for global customers trained in the English language conducting classes. We have full-time teachers in foreign countries which help employees with language skills. This is so that whenever there is a need to transfer one employee from one client to another client working for a different project, they will not find any particular language a barrier. We ensure that the training is done; that they are kept abreast of necessary skills that are needed for working in English. And of course, the locals speak Spanish or Portuguese without any problem. >>>

Outsourcing: Ankur Prakash, Vice President And COO, TCS Latin America (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Aditya Modi

Sramana Mitra: So, in terms of the evolution of outsourcing in Latin America, how do you manage the situation? How do you manage a region that is maturing late compared to India. The number of people with five or 10 years of experience is a lot fewer, right?

Ankur Prakash: That is correct, but there is also too much polarization of industries in Latin America. There are more than 3,000 IT companies across Latin America with fewer than 50 employees. So, you know, a lot of people have opened up these small companies that are serving the market in one way or the other. Whenever there is a chance for a professional to join a company like TCS, he or she is more than willing, is more than happy to do that. And it’s a fact that we are able to attract lots of talented people. We hire talented individuals and use them over a period in multiple projects, in multiple domains, in multiple industries, and in multiple technologies. There is no hire-and-fire policy; what we offer attracts enough talent for what we need. >>>

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. >>>