(AUSTER PRESS RELEASE)

BPO service provider Firstsource Solutions has bagged a five-year outsourcing deal worth Rs 145 crore from Idea Cellular. This will be for providing customer management and billing services in Idea’s Kerala and Tamil Nadu circles.
“Firstsource will provide a suite of customer management interaction services, including billing, new product information, and plan detail-related interaction services to Idea from its centre in Coimbatore,” Mumbai-based Firstsource said in a statement on Tuesday that these services will be provided for the telco’s subscribers in English, Malayalam and Tamil. Firstsource is already a partner for Bharti Airtel, India’s largest telecom operator.

Cost pressures push special effects outsourcing to India

Outsourcing to India, long dominated by software engineering and back-office work, is expanding in new terrain: special effects for movies.
India’s rise comes at a difficult time for US special effects outfits, some of which have buckled as the 2008 Los Angeles writers strike cut productions and the financial crisis curtailed financing. Executives in India say cost pressures are pushing studios to send more work to India, where special effects projects are up to 40% cheaper than in the US.

BPO: Taking a call during downturn

(Vishwa Prakash, CEO, Auster BPO)

The current economic turmoil was supposed to play out to their advantage. Unlike IT services, which are largely project-based and discretionary in nature, business processes outsourcing (BPO) has always been considered too critical for organisations to trim, even in a downturn. Customer stickiness was taken for ranted. Even until a few months ago, BPO chieftains were arguing in favour of a positive impact of recession on business.
"As organisations across the world struggle with declining revenues, the new corporate mantra is all about chipping fixed costs, and outsourcing is the only solution," is how a chief executive officer of a mid-sized Indian BPO summed up the situation early last year. However, the months that followed have not quite lived up to his statement.

MNCs stick with plan for captive BPO units here

(Shyamla, Project Manager - AUSTER BPO)

Global corporations, still smarting under the downturn, are stepping back gingerly into India with elaborate expansion plans, while some others are winding up operations here. Standard Chartered, SuperValu, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank are going ahead with expansion of their IT/BPO centres in India, notwithstanding the fact that a few such units have been sold to third-party service-providers.
There are an estimated over 300 IT/BPO captives in India which employ 100 to over 5,000 people. Global financial services major Standard Chartered will be looking at doubling its headcount at its captive BPO operation in India-Scope International. “For us (Scope), we will continue to grow our captives in three locations-China, Malaysia and India. Investments in captives can make the parent company stronger, bigger and more lean,” said Edwin Nevis, CEO of Scope and group head of Global Shared Services Centres (GSSC), Standard Chartered Group.