Why Outsource to India?

India is fast becoming a global hub for offshore back-office services as U.S. and European companies increasingly shift their IT services, call-center operations and other business processes to the subcontinent.

What's fueling the stampede, of course, is the desire to gain access to the country’s lower-cost, high-quality labor--in some technology areas, higher-quality labor--as well as global technological changes that make it possible to offshore white-collar activities that once had to stay close to home.

The key factors involved in the success of Outsourcing to India:

• Providing low-cost, high-quality software-development services remotely require well-developed processes for managing large-scale projects in distributed locations.
• Also, it’s not easy for the multinationals to create a work force equal to ours in a country like India . The multinationals have to compete here for the talent and then train the people. There are many processes that have to be built up over a period of time to do that effectively.
• And of course, just having talented employees trained to deliver services is not enough. We have developed tools, methodologies, processes, and the management expertise for providing services to clients across geographic distances.
• We develop software in a geographically distributed way, in collaboration with customers. Our approach takes advantage of the 24-hour workday.
• The first category of activities--the ones that must be done close to the customer--involves defining the project with the client and helping the client to install and use the software once it is developed.
• These activities include business consulting, IT consulting, defining requirements, installing the software, training the customer to use it, and rapid-reaction maintenance services.
• The second category of activities--the ones done in our development centers in India --consists of technology tasks done most cost-effectively in remote locations.
• They include detailed function-design tasks, detailed technical design, database design, programming, testing, and creating documentation and long-term maintenance services.
• We are developing the skills to do more IT consulting, and now, business consulting. We have somewhere around 300 business consultants. These are people who do work that then leads to downstream software work.
• We have also started a systems integration practice as well as a business-process-outsourcing arm. We want to provide a large portfolio of services to our customers.
• The multinationals have to compete here for the talent and then train the people. There are many. Our biggest challenge is to become proactive problem definers rather than be reactive problem solvers. Right now, we solve problems our customers define.
• Our focus is on providing solutions leveraging IT. We need to help shape the design of the technology solutions and then implement those solutions. This is the biggest challenge we face--there's no doubt about that.