WHAT'S UP

As Prayag marches closer towards its fourth year of operations, we felt it was time to take Confluence, our newsletter, to the next level. Going forward, we will be publishing it quarterly with richer content; we are also coming out with a limited print edition. And that’s not all. We are launching a thought

leadership forum, also called Confluence, for IT professionals. The aim of this forum is to create the right ambience for industry professionals and influencers to discuss relevant market and customer facing issues in some detail.

A lot has been said and written about the outsourcing backlash. NASSCOM’s recent conference at Mumbai also focused on this topic. We felt it would be useful to go to the next level of detail and discuss actual experiences that companies may have had in this area. To find answers to questions such as –

Is this issue more pertinent to BPO than to IT services?
How does deal size impact the extent of backlash?
What can companies do to handle this issue sensitively?
What are the direct and indirect consequences of the backlash?
Is this going to be a temporary phenomenon?

The inaugural session of “Confluence – the forum” is being held on February 27th at Bangalore – will have a panel discussion with participants from leading companies such as Infosys and Wipro debating on the above theme.

In an era where offshoring has become mainstream, the attention this trend has received from influencers such as the media and analysts has been unprecedented. The analysts are becoming a very important constituency for IT service providers as they can not only write, but also more directly influence buyer behavior. Hence, at Confluence – the forum, we will also be focusing on the role of industry analysts such as Gartner and Forrester in shaping market perceptions.

More details about the forum are available at www.prayag.com.

The role of marketing, in an environment such as this, cannot be emphasized enough. Companies need to arrive at the right messages that will allow them to take advantage of the positive trend while mitigating the negative impact of the backlash. Many companies have realized the importance of strengthening, or in some cases, creating a marketing function. While larger companies have been hiring people to supplement their existing teams, emerging companies have begun creating in-house teams.

Companies have also begin exploring the idea of outsourcing select marketing functions in order to expand their footprint more quickly, as well as to gain access to specialized resources. In fact, younger companies are also experimenting with totally outsourcing their marketing function. The advantages they see are two fold- ability to focus on business growth while the outsourcing partner focuses on the marketing activities, and flexibility to manage multi-functional ( which is typical of marketing) resource requirements.

In keeping with the hottest trend in the industry, this issue of Confluence analyzes the reasons behind offshoring becoming main stream.

Complementing this is an analysis of key business metrics of the first tier players. This analysis should throw light on the dimensions of growth of the Indian IT industry.

One of the offshoots of India being acknowledged as a knowledge hub is the increasing interest of global VCs on India. In fact, a team of high profile VCs visited India in December 2003 on an exploratory trip. In this issue of Confluence, we feature an interview with Sanjay Anandaram, Managing Director, Jumpstartup, a leading VC firm from India focused on funding early stage startups.

Lastly, the BPO and call center industry has been a leading contributor to the transformation of India into a global outsourcing hub. And, a fast rising star in this segment is Intelenet Global Services, a joint venture of TCS and HDFC. Intelenet has seen tremendous market traction in the last 18 months, and it was imperative for them to educate customers who were offshoring business processes for the first time, as well as help them with the selection of processes. Further, they needed a platform that would facilitate seamless and high quality execution.

Intelenet created a consultative cum operational tool with which to achieve the twin objectives of education and execution. This is featured in our best practices section.