Thursday, September 20, 2012

Top-notch talent pool lures IT, BPO firms to Karnataka

The trend points to manpower availability for skills that are more than plain vanilla outsourcing work that companies indulged in earlier.

Despite a slowdown, Karnataka continues to draw IT and BPO companies due to the large talent pool and specialised skill sets.

In the last two months, four IT and BPO companies have opened development centres in Karnataka.

Nasdaq-listed Pegasystems opened a new development centre totalling 55,000 square feet in workspace. The Bangalore centre will support its global operations and will deliver R&D, engineering services, industry solutions framework and customer support to its global Fortune 500 clients, similar to other software majors.

In July, Xchanging, a London Stock Exchange (LSE)-listed IT and BPO company opened a new centre in Shimoga Special Economic Zone and aims to hire 3,000 people by 2013.

Similarly, Serco, a BPO company this week opened a new facility at Shimoga and plans to have a total headcount of 450 people by November. The facility will offer BPO services to a leading privately held telecom company.

‘ATTRACTIVE PROPOSITION’

According to analysts, despite higher costs due to inflation, availability of talent still makes it an attractive proposition.

“We did not open operations only due to cost but to help us drive the next wave of growth based on our value proposition,” said Alan Trefler, founder and CEO, Pegasystems.

“No other location in the world offers the large pool of quality talent found in cities such as Bangalore. They offer a bundle of distinct and mutually reinforcing benefits which companies can leverage for competitive advantage,” said Peter Schumacher, CEO, Value Leadership Group.

A further proof of this can be seen from the fact that this month, Ellucian, a company that provides technology for higher education opened a new development centre in the heart of Bangalore.

All this points to manpower availability for skills that are more than plain vanilla outsourcing work that companies indulged in earlier.

“Companies are focussing on areas such as predictive analytics for the US financial sector, regulatory compliance related work etc. as compared to call centre kind of jobs,” said Sanjoy Sen, senior director, Deloitte.

PREMIUM ON TALENT

Sidhant Rastogi, director, Zinnov, said: “In most cases, companies setting up their centres were unable to find the right talent in the right number in their native geography, or could not source talent locally in the near future.”

A recent study by Zinnov found that India will produce 250,000 engineers from only tier 1 engineering colleges over the next five years.

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