Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: A1 Future CEO Srish Agrawal, Kolkata, India (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you hire from now? In the course of the last 10 years, what has been your hiring strategy?

Srish Agrawal: Either we hire from art colleges in Calcutta or we also advertise and invite people to come down to our office. We give them a piece of paper and ask them to draw something. There are several artists who did not get an opportunity to get into college, but they are really good at hand drawing. So, we ask them to do some kind of hand drawing. If they are good at hand drawing and visualizing what we want them to do, we hire them and teach them how to use computers. >>>

Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: A1 Future CEO Srish Agrawal, Kolkata, India (Part 2)

SM: What kind of price range did you have for these projects? Let’s say you did a mockup in 2002, 2003 time frame. What size project would you expect to get from that bid?

SA: Normally, the projects were between $200 and $600. That was the range we were working on. $200 to $600 was the median range.

SM: So, you could absorb the cost of the mockup? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Diarmuid Mallon, Head of Product Marketing for Sybase, an SAP Company, on Mobile Banking (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you walk me through the workflow of that?

Diarmuid Mallon: What we have is the person who sends the money has a mobile wallet that has cash loaded into it. Now, I say the person sending the money, but it could be cash loaded by an agent, or the person could have transferred the money to the wallet from a bank account. The customer then uses the mobile phone to send the money to a particular universal ID and then inform the recipient that the money has been sent. It could be that the recipient receives a call from the person sending the money, or the recipient knows that x amount of money will be sent every week. >>>

Outsourcing: Million-Dollar Freelancer: A1 Future CEO Srish Agrawal, Kolkata, India (Part 1)

The founders of Elance, Freelancer.com, and others perhaps never envisioned that one day smart, industrious, and innovative contractors would use the freelance work platforms to build million-dollar businesses. Srish Agrawal, CEO of A1 Future Technologies created accounts on Elance and Scriptlance, which was acquired by Freelancer.com in July 2012, and before long, he found himself at the helm of a thriving Web development business.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Srish. Let’s start with your story. Where are you from? Where did you grow up, and what kind of environment did you start working in? >>>

Outsourcing: Gopinathan Padmanabhan, Executive VP and Head of Global Delivery, MPhasiS (Part 8)

Sramana Mitra: And the banking and financial services focus that you’re developing, is this going to be a global focus, or is it just North America?

Gopinathan Padmanabhan: It’s going to be global, absolutely global. In all regions, we are pushing for our presence in that particular space. We may not be the king of the world, but we are the king of the hill in the region we occupy.

SM: But that’s the only way you can compete in the market. You cannot be king of the world. >>>

Outsourcing: Gopinathan Padmanabhan, Executive VP and Head of Global Delivery, MPhasiS (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re describing is probably the case with all of your competitors, with the entire industry. They train internally for the core, and then they go outside for the more specialized stuff.

Gopinathan Padmanabhan: That is correct.

SM: We’ve covered quite a lot of ground. Is there any other area you want to discuss? >>>

Outsourcing: Gopinathan Padmanabhan, Executive VP and Head of Global Delivery, MPhasiS (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What does it cost to maintain these residential boot camps? What is the cost structure of your training?

Gopinathan Padmanabhan: I don’t have an exact number. I can tell you that we provide them like a campus.

SM: It sounds like it’s a fairly expensive affair, right? >>>

Outsourcing: Gopinathan Padmanabhan, Executive VP and Head of Global Delivery, MPhasiS (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In your estimate, how big is the workforce in India in these tier two and tier three cities? How many jobs do you think are being supported in this mode?

Gopinathan Padmanabhan: I don’t have a number. If you asked me to venture a guess, I would say roughly 5% to 10% of the total IT workforce because BPO does employ a huge number of people.

SM: That’s  significant.

GP: It’s significant, but as I said, BPO employs a large number of people. >>>