(About the show - Sponsored by Reliance Money, it is a discussions based show dealing with the economic issues and initiatives in the country. Many prominent experts and economists have been a part of the show.)

For the episode in question, focus of the discussion was “Rural BPO and Business to Rural ” where the panelists shared their views about the scope and future of India’s rural BPO market.

Other panelists on the show were –
• Biplab Saha, Business Head, Source for Change
• Dhiraj Tolwani, CEO, B2R Technologies
• Murli Vullaganti, CEO, Rural Shores (also a prestigious client of Drishti)

The clippings of the show are attached in this blog. It’s an interesting and thought provoking discussion to watch.

The highlight of the show was of course the host Mr. Pankaj Pachauri who was ready with so much data and statistics that it gave the discussion a direction and weight rather than just being a discussion about opinions of 4 people. Parallels were drawn from the success of Indian IT industry and opportunities of job creation via moving the BPOs to Tier 2 Tier 3 cities and even villages.

My summary and take aways for entrepreneurs who plan to venture out in Rural BPO space:

a) Look for Business around you. There is a growing need of companies to interact with their customers and being able to go closer to them is a huge opportunity.

Look for B2C services like Telecom, Micro-finance, Retail services and one should be able to find opportunities. There might not be ready made opportunities so be creative.

I recently read success story of micro-finance firm SKS. I am sure they will be interested in learning how you can provide support to their customers locally.

b) Hire your core team which has experience and then build a team around it.

c) Evaluate technology which is homegrown and can be supported easily in the region. What works in the west does not work in India similarly what works in Delhi might not work in Jhunjhunu.

d) Make a business case of it rather than making it a social venture. Social ventures are good publicities but companies will trust you with their customers only if one can deliver.

I am confident that this space would see a lot of investment and experiment. This would also help in inclusive growth bringing IT to the bottom of the pyramid and creating jobs and reverse brain drain.

Exciting times Ahead!

To achieve sustainable success, tech firms will have to increase their investments in the region and diversify focus on data by offering Unified Communication (UC) solutions to SME customers, which represent a significant growth sector. Researchers have constantly trumpeted growth in the overall unified application implementation market by four percent in Asia-Pacific, which is expected to be worth around $3.6 billion by 2012, making it a very promising proposition for investors. Businesses need to deliver a new business model, specializing in solution services that help organizations to enhance their functionalities.

With exceedingly high fund flow from India and China the investment scenario in South-East Asia is likely to dramatically increase topped with the markets brimming with highly skilled labour base. Tech firms need to junk the traditional channels of distribution, with need for more value-added resellers, system integrators and service providers which will coherently enable them to deliver managed services through a joint approach with service providers.

With growth inertia suffocating the European and the US markets where there are ultra-competitions and intense regulations, firms need to focus on the non traditional markets of Asia and have an expanded base of channel partners which will help them make deeper inroads into the markets across Asia Pacific and focus on the SME sector in a big way. In Asia Pacific, SME’s constitute 70-80 per cent of the business environment and it is critical for enterprises to work with this segment. In order to increase profits one has to expand into Asia. Asia is the future and has the population with enormous growth potentials and despite the downturn in the global economy, it remains promising.

Enterprises need to have a planned focus on on-demand, BPO and tertiary solutions, in untapped geographies where the company can add value with its solutions as the region is still largely untapped and has a lot of potential. SE-Asia has a lot of growth potential and tech firms have a good market for their solutions for BPO’s and enterprises alike.

The recessionary period was challenging one for all enterprises. However, it allowed for more intent focus on business and delivering what was best for customers. Tech firms were challenged to create business value with smaller budgets for enterprise. Also due to recession many companies postponed making huge new investments in communications technology except that which could not be avoided. This has resulted in a skewed up demand in the market currently. Previous years challenges have made enterprises seek maximum value out of existing investments even as they embrace new technology. The way forward is by driving the communication enablement of business systems across the enterprise and doing it by enabling smoother migration to the future.

My thought process came to a rest when I got the second call from him. He presented a questionnaire to me to which I was supposed to answer based on my experience in the industry. The discussion was about the importance of telecommunication Software/Hardware in the IT & ITES industry. He also enquired about the corporates in the field and the new verticals getting associated with it.

Here’s a summary of the entire episode -

Quest: Where is the Telecommunication Industry heading?
Me: The industry is moving towards feature-rich IP-PBX soft or hardware boxes. As opposed to the previous inclination towards traditional systems, today no company wants to run their business on what is available in the market but how it can support their business processes.

Quest: What do you feel about the market growth for Software Solutions in this domain?
Me: Having been in the field directly for a few years now, I have seen a tremendous growth in as well as acceptance of the industry towards software solutions. The ability of a software-based solution to mould to any kind of requirement is commendable. Especially with the SOA approach, the technology provider is able to deliver a host of features unlike boxed solutions.

Quest: Who all are the big players in the industry?
Me: In our industry, the most experienced players are Avaya, Aspect, Nortel, and Alcatel Lucent etc. However, the market share remains a questioned territory since the domestic market acceptance of their solutions is affected by the following take-aways associated with the solution –

1.    Very expensive products
2.    Sold only in tier 1 Corporates or call centers
3.    Very limited market ex: 24X7, Accenture, ACD, WNS HTMT, Minacs Etc. (affordability issues)

The current scenario calls for an Opex model. All leading BPOs are evaluating best solutions that can fulfill an Opex requirement. Here the Big Daddies fail to deliver and make a path for vendors like us. Drishti becomes a perfect fit here with a feature-rich solution that is both flexible and affordable. Our robust technology platform can support both capex as well as Opex deployments with equal panache and that takes us ahead of the big names I mentioned previously.

Quest: What is their individual Market share?
Me:  These American brands approximately hold 10-15%, PBX People hold 25% and the space where we and solutions like ours operate is somewhere around 20 %. The rest goes to unmanaged Market. This is close to 40% where 5-25/30 seater call centers operate, and they use VICIdial solution or freeware like Asterisk. Actually, we cannot really have an idea of market share in this unmanaged segment and these are just approximate values.

Quest: Do you think you can sell and compete with the Tier 1 Industry Players?
Me:  Yes, we have already won against the top players in past and continue to do so. Some of our victories here include our prime customers and reputed organizations like MOSL, Book my Show, E4E, Kochar, Teamlease etc. where we were in direct competition with at least one of the Tier 1 players and Drishti came out victorious with a very satisfied customer base.

Quest: What are your new venture areas and which verticals are you focusing at?
Me:  We are focusing on outsourced Call centers (tier 2 and 1) and enterprises for captive call centers. The industry verticals where we can position our solutions also include HR, BFSI, Healthcare, Education and Entertainment. Some of our diverse industry deployments include Teamlease as HR, WLC on Education, Book my Show on Entertainment, Rural Shores on Rural BPO etc.

This was my interview part. During the conversation, I actually felt like an industry expert giving out interviews professionally. As the episode ended, I came to realize what had actually happened and then began a new excitement within me - an excitement to share the experience with my team. And so I Did. So, here I am on suggestion of Drishti Marketing Team writing a blog entry about my interview.
Cheers!!

Movement to low-cost Tier- 2/3 cities seems attractive despite lower employability and higher management overheads. However, industry analysis shows that providers can reduce their total operating costs by nearly 20-30 percent by making this shift within India. This would empower the industry to effectively tap labor pools in several states across India.

Taking a closer look at the industry stats, the picture says that the Indian BPO industry is slated to rise to 220-280 Billion USD by 2012 generating around 2 million direct jobs. This vast opportunity can be capitalized well by the Tier 2/ 3 regions in India. Technology availability would help develop the ecosystem required for BPO industry to flourish.

A successful BPO hub in any Tier 2/ 3 cities demands creation of an enabling physical (international connectivity, mass-transport system, telecom connectivity, power, housing, etc.) as well as social (healthcare, education, shopping and entertainment, security, hotels, etc.) infrastructure.

 The current drawbacks for Tier 2/ 3 regions arise from the basic reason of lesser proximity from technologically developed cities. This creates a natural lag in the industry specific skill-set of the available manpower. For a contact center, overcoming language and accent barriers, getting trained supervisors & IT personnel and local support from the solution provider become key challenges.

With the idea of building the engines of a Smarter Planet, the trend globally and in India, is for customers to look for solutions and services and not just products. They also seem to prefer the familiarity of long-term relationships over purely sale-based transactions. The need of the hour is deeper, more consultative selling and building stronger relationships with the customer. Through this enablement event IBM intended to first strengthen relationships with partners like Drishti-Soft to create a more fertile ecosystem that will benefit the end clients.

To start off this process of change IBM invited its valued business partners to attend the event ‘ISV Partner Enablement Meet’. The event listed and provided guidance to ISV’s like Drishti-Soft as to how working more closely with IBM can strategically enable a successful win-win strategy for partners.

With IBMs support for
– Providing partners with marketing support and resources in order to expand business reach,
– Providing partners with brand recognition to leverage on and
– Establishing credibility in the market and increase market share;

partners like Drishti have an ideal enabler to successfully target and tap markets across verticals and domains.

While working more closely with IBM, partners get the benefits of collaborative selling - IBM’s knowledge, credibility and financial backing. Partners can leverage IBM to generate increased revenue from providing solid, long-term solutions.

With IBMs initiative and regular enablement events like these, we businesses are surely moving in the right direction to achieve continued success and strive for more innovative and competitive offerings in the ever changing business environment.

As technology evolved over time, the hardware-centric perspective was replaced by software-centric approach. Rigid, inflexible, “boxed” technologies were replaced by software applications that not only performed more functions, but could also accommodate changes in the system over time, as adopting organizations grew in terms of size and complexity. Software also brought in new concepts and innovative business models like SOA, Software as a service (SaaS), and Voice over IP (VoIP) that changed the way communications took place. As a result more companies are looking at flexible technology platforms that not only bring in increased value in terms of usability, deployment, scalability and reliability, but also demonstrate quick ROI.

Some of the main drivers for adopting best-in-class technologies are

·         Innovative business models and packaging for each vertical, process or workflow

·         Simple scaling up for growing enterprises

·         Ability to pick features “a-la-carte” (Choosing only what one needs)

·         Lower support cost, and the need to maintain huge in-house IT infrastructure/workforce

·         High uptime and lower human error (or dependencies) for mission critical processes

·         Automatic updates for software; No “shelf-life” factor

Best-in-class technology platform provide fast application/service creation approach that are typical of open-standards, IP-based systems. They also empower creation of holistic solution packages that can be designed for various kinds of Contact Centres that have different needs. For instance, a Customer Support unit for a banking process will have quite different needs of a Telecom-based Customer Support unit. A unified, but flexible based frameworks or solution can bridge this gap adeptly.

Currently two types of VAS exist, one which is stand alone from an operational perspective, not to be coupled with other services (voice & non-voice services fall into this category). These are often provided as an optional service along with voice services, but they could be offered and used by themselves without the voice service. Another is services that do not stand-alone and which add value to existing services.

The VAS market constitutes about 10-12% per cent of the total revenues for telecom operators in India. With 3G services jostling its way in, the VAS industry is expected to increase its share manifold, with some industry estimates pegging the figure at 40% by 2015. The prime movers in the VAS industry are Bollywood and Cricket, but we see other content like gaming etc fast catching up. The reason why VAS market is growing is due to improved regulatory structure, reducing handset prices, unprecedented mobile growth, and reduced tariffs leading to declining ARPU’s. Subsequent to this Telco’s are looking for alternative offerings like VAS in order to tackle high competition due to reduced barriers to entry and the impending Mobile Number Mobility regulation.

The key challenges facing the VAS industry are regulations with copyright, operators’ revenue shares and infrastructure bandwidth. Operators and providers will have to be little proactive in the industry to beat the stiff competition by making marketing a continuous process, identifying new business opportunities and developing a clearly defined value proposition for the target market.

A couple of years back, mobile operators only focused on expanding their networks and improving their subscriber base. Today, to supplement stagnant voice revenues, cellular operators are turning to VAS to boost revenue in both data and value-added voice services. Also, with 3G mobile services, service providers would bank on the VAS segment to bring in additional revenues. Improved technology, phones with larger screen sizes and multimedia capabilities, improved GPRS networks will be key drivers of the VAS segment. Some key future growth areas for VAS would be in the fields of SMS, IVR – in areas of low literacy rate, Mobile Music, Internet Applications, Search – SMS based search, User Generated Content / Social Networking Communities & mCommerce which currently has limited scope due to security and penetration consideration.

With revenues currently skewed in favour of the operators not much content is created and made available for the mobile. With mobile operators currently focusing on expanding their networks and improving their subscriber base focus would shift once operators achieve saturation point and witness further dip in ARPUs. Market dynamics will eventually sort out the disparity in revenue sharing.

A healthy India would certainly be a wealthy India.
Healthcare for all has still remained a luxury for about 70% of the Indian population, with location limitations and cost of treatment being the biggest hindrances and roadblocks coming in the way of achieving what our founding forefathers had always dreamt of. With only 1 doctor for 10000 patients and that too in urban areas (rural ratio is even more skewed unfavourably), a mechanism to achieve location independence and optimizing resource allocation to manage shortfall with capability to reach the needy at the right time has to be developed if India has to achieve its human development goals.

It’s not that the government is not concerned about the effort it needs to put to make healthcare accessible to all, but then with severe resource crunch both in terms of manpower and finances, the change is hard to come by. On top of it all, with poor literacy levels in rural India and in some pockets of urban India and inherent mismanagement of resource and information dissemination mechanisms, the problem has grown manifold.

Off late the private sector has been in the forefront of adopting ICT to achieve a competitive edge in order to become top Healthcare Providers in their segments. They constantly seek to achieve operating efficiency and reduce any client loss with optimum resource allocation. This they have been able to achieve by increased accessibility to citizens and improved customer service. With telephony penetration becoming the biggest success story in India after the BPO boom, this adoption of technology has really acted as a catalyst to revitalize the healthcare scenario in India.

Telephony has become the key to unlock and present the healthcare fortunes to the needy and further the Indian success story. The governments at both the levels are too keenly following up innovations on this front and are themselves intent to widen the scope and reach of this essential public service.
Telephony IVR and especially its usage in healthcare can ensure services to reach the right person at the right time. With support for multiple languages, it is ideal for the Indian environs where 40 written and spoken languages jostle for space. Leveraging Web application technologies can enable cheaper costs and quick response consultancy to patients/ citizens across regions.

Advanced call control to deliver completely automated answering solutions and solutions that gather information and connect callers to the appropriate hospital, doctor, service provider, or support agent will enable right advice to the right patient at the right time and can thereby solve the problem of resources, location dependence and costs. Now even the poor can have access to the best consultancy on matters related to health simply through a phone call and are not supposed to jostle to big cities for diagnosis and treatment related information.

IVR based healthcare can become a robust information dissemination system and can act as a mass-reach info system that is centrally monitored and generates end user based touch points. A citizen can log queries, feedback and complaints related to personal health, local sanitation and other health related queries over the IVR and can get speedy and guided response on the same.

Bureaucracy related red-tapism can be replaced by more agile and accountable citizen related resource management. The IVR can also become a tool for the healthcare providers to widen the reach and dissemination of information/schemes/activities related to personal/social hygiene whereby a lot more accountability in the management of resources and efforts can be achieved.

ICT utilization and especially use of IVR in healthcare can certainly enable improved service offerings like appointment scheduling / time based contact / feedback mechanism which are currently limited and overburdened due to resource mismatches. It can act as a mechanism that provides value, timely & proactive Consultancy/added services like diagnostic facility for patients with recurring health care needs, Maintaining relevant medical history and diagnostic reports of patients. Optimal Resource Allocation with coordination in scheduling and availability of resources and delivery of location independent services are some of the other benefits of Healthcare IVR.

A system that is simple, cost-effective and relevant would surely make healthcare for all a reality in the coming future…

Technologically speaking, even though it caters primarily to each and every sectoral thrust this age old saying holds a fundamental value that is even more entrenched as a mainstay in any software development activity. When enterprises look for an IT based resolution for their pain points it’s more or less propositioned that an initial requirement analysis will be followed up by a generic development, testing, setup and installation phases.

Enterprises so logically inclined to get the deliverance as soon as possible and reduce the underlying costs recurring due to extended product development activity seek for an out an out off the shelf product that fits into their scheme of things ideally. But in this melee of targeted outputs and factored growth, they forget the basic tenet that one size never fits all. The basic idea being - fetch an existing product and customize it to the underlying needs in the fastest possible time.

The activity that always bears the brunt of such requirement is the elicitation process which according to enterprises is always ongoing alongside a development activity rather than something which needs investment separately in time or money. This stop-gap effort results in disasters for some and usually catastrophes for many. Businesses usually do not see time spent on initial requirement gathering as something which is worthy of some deliberation. Also the technology firms in order to improve the portfolio seek to forego this activity in order to meet deadlines. It’s only in the long run that these defaults start taking shape of a potential explosion waiting to happen.

Enterprises should understand the cost-benefit analysis of this important activity as though treating this as a simultaneous activity may be putting less strain on the critical money supply but then any critical default here has the potential to bleed the same inherently. A service agency also might be hell bent to deliver the offering without due care to the elicitation activity but then it also becomes an eyesore for them in the long run. Yes one does have believers in this model as benefits apprised range from being cost-effective to speedy to supporter’s favoring constant inputs of ideas as according to them not many a times even the businesses are understanding the actual requirement of the project at hand and the related knowledge and input has to come and incorporated on as and when basis. Though this may seem ideal but then it has its own fallacies of making the product inherently unstable and patchy.

Requirement gathering activity performed with the due intent and before a product is developed helps in synergizing and energizing the stakeholders who are now equipped with a tool that enables them to be actively involved in the product development and seek an offering that best suits there business requirements. Dedicated time spent in the initial phases of the development helps in standardizing and hard-coding the requirements. The technology firm delivering the product also gets to understand the as-is requirement of the business and prepares an offering that becomes an ideal solution to the clients needs. Also focusing more on the initial phase allows business and the technology firms to understand the related time / effort / cost investments that they need and can invest and hence are cushioned against any related defaults or overruns. The scope for frequent changes beyond the initial phase also reduces drastically and the end product becomes immensely stable thereby providing enhanced user experience. The expectant costs attached with this activity may seem high in the hindsight but is purely worth the effort as the costs for frequent related support and up gradation activities gradually reduces.

Even though the present business scenarios have led businesses to think poorly of this core aspect of any product development but the age old saying of “a stitch in time, saves a dime” surely has come of age.

Interestingly IBM’s Global CIO study 2009 indicates that leveraging analytics is now the top priority for CIO’s. Business intelligence & analytics was identified by 83% of respondents as the top focus area to increase the enterprise competitiveness. CIO’s at high growth rate companies are 61% more likely to proactively turn data into actionable information.

V Subramanyam - VP Channel Management IBM India, spoke about the information management system and how useful information needs to be segregated to reduce data churning. He gave typical examples of companies like Incois which has used the seismic data to generate safety alerts, HDFC Ergo which have enabled faster turnaround in processing insurance claims by proper information management.

Uday Gurkar – CA – Former GM(Business planning & Analytics at Aventis Pharma), spoke about CFO’s prospective on new areas like GAAP, IFRRS, XBRL, fast close, rolling forecast & actual Vs budgeted MIS using tools like IBM COGNOS.

Famous Commentator – Harsha Bhogle also gave some very interesting insights into information led transformation which are taking place in all sports specially CRICKET! Like how Duckworth Lewis is calculated in a game hampered by rain, how data analysis is helping in cricket, how players are profiled based on their past performances & previous statistics. Countries like US use best sports analytics using data mining & information mining. It was a really interesting & interactive session with Harsha with lots of fun filled experiences off the field & on the field of cricket was shared by the star commentator.

Nitin Singhal – Country Manager IBM (Business Analytics) also shared his views on accelerating the information led transformation giving examples from the industry like
• Human Resource Analytics – Talent analytics, performance management, productivity management & workforce management.
• Sales Analytics- pipelining performance, foresee performance, sales segmentation, Customer relation, Pricing & program performance
• Procurement Analytics – Spend analysis, Vendor analysis, Contract management, operation efficiency

He concluded his session with the point that analytics are key to Business optimization & IBM smart analytics system can help you in
• Smarter communication
• Smarter Insurance
• Smarter Banking
• Smarter Government

Post lunch session was a dedicated session for information technology track

Nagendra Nyamgondalu – Senior Manager, Information Management Solution & Datawarehousing (India/SA) shared his views on how internal business processes need right information at right time. He gave typical examples of slow sales cycles, cutbacks, reluctant clients & intense competition – business leaders are really feeling the heat to act fast, but a single bad decision today could be fatal. So what is the key to working smarter? It is in having the right information & insight to drive smarter business outcomes. His session explained how IBM smart analytics system can give your organization the insight it needs to work smarter in this challenging environment by putting the right answers in the hands of your decision makers today while putting your business in the best position to quickly adapt & grow to answer the questions of tomorrow. He explained how this unique, deeply integrated & optimized, ready-to-use analytics solution leverages a flexible infrastructure of IBM software, servers & storage – to quickly turn information into insights.

Data growth is estimated at 30% annually. Yet you are directed to cut costs. How do you do that without cutting performance, reliability, scalability or IT’s capacity to support your company’s objectives? It may not be immediately obvious, but your enterprise database affects all those variables. Is Database administrators expenses a large part of your IT budget? Is your storage infrastructure growing by leaps & bounds? Parag Pithia, Senior Manager -Information management system IBM India/SA explained the ways that your enterprise database can help or examine the ways that your enterprise database can help or hinder the bottom line, he clearly pointed how to uncover cost savings while delivering performance, automation, productivity, Green IT & more…

Managing content centric business processes & gaining control speaking on the same Harpreet Dhariwal – Advisory IT specialist Information management system IBM India/SA put emphasis on how much of your information is over-retained, irrelevant or duplicated? So do you have a clear compliance agenda and a roadmap that guides you towards that? Are you struggling with tactical compliance and e-discovery agenda by delivering capabilities and a prospective approach to reduce complexity, lower risk & cost and improve business agility?

The entire event was a day-long affair, but the mix of ideas and experiences presented was enough to keep the audience hooked till the end. With industry moguls sharing their first-hand success and failure stories and exploring the possible reasons and hence remedies for leveraging information technology in the right manner was a truly enjoyable and learning experience for me.