One of the hardest hit industries like many others during recession, the BPO sector is now witnessing a gradual upturn. Times have changed and so have the demands. While in the past BPOs were looked at as a separate service when compared to IT, today the IT and ITeS services are often coupled together as a single sector. Thus organizations like ours (Caliber Point & Hexaware), which have a blend of these services, provide a winning combination to customers. Some companies like ours are now bringing a third element to this service combination ? analytics. It is one of the ways to move up in the value chain while providing value to customers. With technology trends like cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) coming into the market, customers want their vendors to be capable of delivering an overall solution.

With the outsourcing industry maturing, customer expectations also have undergone a transition. Previously, value-addition was synonymous with specialized offerings complemented by add-ons like six-sigma and other process improvement capabilities. Now, customers expect comprehensive capability on the part of service providers and the ability to help them to be the industry benchmark, in addition to increasing efficiency at functional levels. Moreover, customers are increasingly looking at on-shore and near-shore delivery capability of service providers, in addition to offshoring.

On a different note, a noticeable fact now is the lucrative prospect that the domestic market holds for the BPO sector. Domestic market is exploding in a big way with BFSI, telecom, government, and public sector becoming major consumers of IT enabled services.

These developments have thus resulted in a change in the operating model of BPOs. Increasing demands have forced large players to partner with smaller firms and collaborate with them to provide services to their customers.
Hence, the environment beckons co-existence than competition. These developments will also result in the de-concentration of industries. The BPO sector will no longer be a business concentrating on only tier-1 cities, but will trickle down further. The oncoming years will witness the spread of BPO related activities into these lesser known areas.

Caliber Point is the independent BPO arm of Hexaware Technologies Limited, a leading global IT & BPO services company.

The author is the CEO of Caliber Point.