Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has evolved tremendously since its inception in the 1990's and has unprecedented potential to grow and add value to client organizations. While the most important value driver for BPO earlier was cost and labor arbitrage; executives today have started to believe that outsourcing can add even more value to their businesses through innovation in technology and operations excellence. However in its early days yet, a mid-2011 survey of about 350 outsourcing buyers conducted by Horses for Sources and The Outsourcing Unit at The London School of Economics captured this contrast between achieving success in cost reduction versus driving innovation on the part of BPO contracts to date. In this survey, respondents rated 18 percent of outsourcing initiatives as very effective in forcing change into a client's business operations. 11 percent of outsourcing contracts were seen by respondents as effective in providing new and creative methods of achieving business value and 46 percent were rated as very effective in reducing operating costs. This shows that buyers have started realizing value of business operations improvement and innovation in their outsourcing engagements.

India, accounting for over 37 percent of the total global outsourcing BPO revenues in 2012 reflects on a huge source of innovation surging out from the country. This in part is catalyzed through Caliber Point, one of the fastest 'organically' growing BPO, headquartered in Mumbai. The company is a wholly owned specialist BPS arm of Hexaware Technologies Limited. As part of their innovation mandate, Caliber Point has a belief that business platforms will help BPO to evolve into yet another generation in the future. With service providers increasingly using technology as the primary differentiator for their BPS offerings, BPaaS based Platform BPS offerings built on cloud are increasingly gaining traction; and Caliber Point is well on its way to gain from this trend.

Platform Enabled BPS: Extension to the Fifth Generation Platforms

Caliber Point envisions building BPaaS based offerings on fifth generation platforms which will bundle state-of-the-art technology and cloud based infrastructure centered on business process delivery. "Through business led platforms, BPaaS can help clients achieve new business outcomes as well as shape the ongoing evolution of the on-demand, centralized and standardized processes as their own needs and requirements change over time," explains Chinmoy Banerjee, CEO, Caliber Point.

At present, Caliber Point has a HRO BPaaS platform in 'republic' and Campus BPO Platform in the Education sector. The company is now planning to build platforms in healthcare and financial services verticals as the next areas of focus.