NEW DELHI: Big blue is getting bigger and betting big on BPOs out of India. Its BPO arm, IBM-Daksh added over 10,000 staff in the last 12 months and now, with over 20,000 employees, it has emerged as the second largest business process outsourcing vendor in India, in terms of headcount. Ahead of IBM-Daksh, is the $500m Genpact with over 23,000 people.
Significantly, the BPO operation has become one of IBM’s key growth drivers in India. IBM-Daksh accounts for about 50% of IBM’s total staff strength in India and serves some of its largest clients. Some of its key clients include Amazon, PayPal, Sprint, HP, Yahoo, Citibank and Bharti Televentures. The last is its biggest client in the domestic business.
However, the India operations that service over 30 clients continue to do a lot of voice tasks. Almost 66% of the work relates to handling calls and barring technology support, this mainly relates to customer care type of activities.
When asked about this, Mr Vaish told ET, “We are focused on CRM, HR, F&A and procurement verticals. We do a lot of high-end finance analytics tasks also. This includes supporting IBM CFOs around various geographies.”
While there has been speculation that Daksh founder and IBM-Daksh CEO Sanjeev Aggarwal is quitting, the company declined to comment on this. Says Pavan Vaish, COO, IBM-Daksh, “We do not comment on speculation.”
Commenting on IBM-Daksh’s growth, Mr Vaish said the employee base has grown by 234% in the last two years. IBM acquired Daksh in ’04 and at that time, its employee strength was around 6,000 people. “We have also beefed up our business transformation outsourcing (BTO) capabilities and we service several end-to-end transformation accounts out of India,” he said.
Dun & Bradstreet (D&B), a business intelligence and consulting firm, is one such account. IBM has signed a seven-year $180m business transformation deal with the company. IBM Daksh helps innovate and manage more than 1,00,000 customer relationships, as well as selected financial and business functions. These include finance and accounts, customer service and collections tasks for D&B. The account is serviced from IBM’s centres in Latin America, Europe and India.
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