BPO Archive

I recently visited with senior executives at Exela Technologies to discuss the interesting strategy their company undertook to succeed in the digital world. Exela’s success is like a caterpillar that goes into a cocoon and emerges as something completely different. The “caterpillar” was stodgy, low-margin, traditional BPO services – uninteresting work in a very

Management consultant and bestselling author Peter Drucker wrote, “The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.” That is, indeed, true for service providers, as new technologies increasingly adopted this year are a catalyst for change in nearly all aspects of the services business. Here are four

A widely quoted phrase these days is “software eats everything.” It refers to the great value that software delivers. I believe it also applies to the profound impact it’s making in the services world. Software is disintermediating the industrialized labor arbitrage model and also infrastructure services. Let’s look at the huge implications for the

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is becoming a big deal in the services industry. For the last 10 years, the Indian IT industry attempted to affect pricing by breaking the link between FTEs and the services they provide. They tried outcome-based or transaction-based pricing. As I have blogged in the past, although this is interesting

I hear people in the services industry asking why automation hasn’t taken off yet. Actually, as long as I’ve been in the industry since the 1980s, we’ve been working on automation. Back in 1983 we were talking about automating business processes and the elimination of most of the people in the services value chain.

Wipro just hired Abid Ali Neemuchwala as COO and group president. Clearly the provider is setting up a succession plan for him to take over Wipro from current CEO, TK Kurien, who has been driving the firm’s transformation. This is an intriguing move as Wipro appears to be succeeding in the turnaround. So it

The advantages of service delivery automation add up to significant value realization. Unfortunately, it’s not a one-time step change. Automating is a continuous shift, and it’s never over. You first assess where it should happen. Then you get comfortable with the tools, get data on the process, get comfortable with the organizational implications of

The BPO segment of the services marketplace has been undergoing significant change in its growth trends. As we lean into 2015, here’s a look at how and where BPO is experiencing the biggest growth. Industry-specific offerings lead growth, and horizontal BPO growth comes from newer segments.  Industry-specific segments The industry-specific segments are growing significantly

Businesses today actively seek — and happily find — a different kind of service provider. Like the fairy tale Goldilocks sizing choices among the three bears, they find some providers are too large, some are too small, but others are just right. The just right players are growing spectacularly. But I believe it’s mainly

Everest Group research has analyzed the impact that automation will have on the services industry. Our opinion, which we refer to as the 40-40 Rule, is that 40 percent of all outsourcing contracts are ready to be impacted by automation and the average impact in the amount of labor to do the work will