BPO Archive

Out of 22 outsourcing stocks, a few have outperformed the S&P to date this year: EXL Service, Global Payments, Star Tek and UEPS. But 18 have underperformed by an average of 9 percent so far. Why is this trend happening? First, investors are always forward looking, and stock disappointments or exuberance are relative to the

Much like Jonathan Swift proposed an outrageous, over-the-top suggestion that the Irish eat their children as a way to accommodate themselves in famine and over-population, I have a modest proposal for Infosys. It’s over the top, but it’s intended to highlight an issue. My modest proposal is that Infosys keep its platform IP business,

There’s a big move underway, especially among the Indian firms, to rebrand away from outsourcing and BPO. The industry now prefers to use a variety of other terms such as BPM, BPS and managed service. But the immediate impact of changing the terminology on a provider’s website is that the website disappears from the

We at Everest Group have been exploring robotics and understanding its potential. What we’re seeing is that it’s relatively easy and cheap to implement. Where it has been implemented to date, it results in somewhere from a 15-20 percent reduction in critical shared services or BPO functions, depending on the transactional nature of the

To date, the global services industry in 2014 has all the signs of being a “son-in-law.” As many parents will tell you about their prospective son-in-law: “He’s nice, but … I was hoping for something a little better.” 2014 arrived with so much promise, both in IT and BPO. Europe’s economy was improving. We

At the request of a BPO provider, we did a fairly exhaustive study of all vendor/provider-funded innovations and their impact on the business growth. The data were startling. Our study clearly revealed that the hundreds of millions of dollars that providers invested in innovation yielded very disappointing returns. Although they often succeeded in taking

I once read that our society’s major accomplishments over the last 50 years were that we had harnessed lightning and used it to get sand to think. This massive leap forward was about using information and computers to automate processes, and it really took center stage in the service marketplace. But 15 years ago

We were recently a sponsor at the 18th annual Shared Services & Outsourcing Week conference in Orlando (part of SSON, the leading event for shared services). The significant portion of attendees that are just embarking on shared services for the first time and opening up new shared services capabilities was striking to us. It

If you owned stock in major BPO companies in 2013, you’re happy, as most of them outperformed the S&P stock market. But you’re a really happy stockholder if you invested in payment transaction companies — those returns are almost twice as sweet as most of the other BPO stocks! As a group, payment transaction

You’ve heard it … read it in the news … and probably even participated in the discussions about it. “It” is the impact of the cloud model on the third-party service provider marketplace. What are the cloud’s potential disruptive effects? As the cloud and outsourcing meet head on, will the cloud make hiccups or