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Indias second largest third party BPO firm, WNS Global Services, has decided to carve out a separate group from its existing serv ices called the business technology group and has moved its chief information officer, Atul Davda, to head the effort. The move will represent the first serious foray by a pure play BPO firm into platform based BPO services, business processes that are run on a unified technology platform owned by the vendor rather than on separate client platforms.
The subject of platformbased BPO has been slightly controversial with IT firms favouring it because of their natural bias towards building and owning technology and a few pureplay BPO firms opposing it.
The contention of the pureplay BPOs has been that clients would not want to switch to a standardised platform from their existing platforms. WNS Group CEO Neeraj Bhargava, however, said the company intended to launch the platform based offering shortly in the market as an external facing initiative and eventually, also report its numbers under a separate head.
Already we get 25 percent of our revenues from services that have a technology component. What we are doing now is consolidating it under a single umbrella and offering to customers.
We intend to get very aggressive with platform based BPO, he said. Customers were also beginning to see the value of standardisation as they made global acquisitions and each firm came with its own platform and set of practices, making it harder to integrate, Mr Bhargava said.
The company has also ventured closer to IT turf with a set of tools for enterprise resource planning ERP that are offered on a licencefee basis to customers. The intention is not to compete with the likes of Satyam and other IT companies, but to offer tools that enable BPO, he said.
These tools help to convert data in different formats to a single standard form that can then be used in running processes such as payroll and HR on platforms like SAP.
WNS, which started off as a British Airways captive, inherited JADE, an endtoend passenger accounting platform from it. It also inherited a few more platforms through its acquisitions over the years as well as a document indexing platform for digital loan management from its acquisition of Trinity, and last year, an autoclaims management platform from its acquisition of Flovate Technologies.
In addition to these, the business technology group headed by Mr Davda will work on developing more platformbased BPO offerings. The pricing for platformbased BPO can be transaction based rather based on the number of seats that dedicated to a process.
According to Sudin Apte, senior analyst and country head India, Forrester Research, BPO firms can delink revenues from manpower only through such initiatives. This has to be way the forward given the challenges of the appreciating rupee and wage inflation, he said.
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