It’s one area where India can continue to remain bullish

Technical support consists of two distinct BPO processes—technical product support on behalf of product vendors and enterprise IT helpdesk for user organizations. Traditionally, the first kind of work has been outsourced to contact center companies like Convergys, Sykes and Stream whereas the enterprise helpdesk has been part of the end-to-end IT outsourcing bundle, going to software services companies like EDS, IBM, CSC and ACS. According to IDC, this market is expected to reach $28.4 billion globally, by 2006. India has been able to attract both. While the fundamental reason has been India’s technical manpower, their evolution have been different.

Product support has been driven by two factors. The first is the realization by MNC IT companies that the country can be a good product-support base. Companies like Microsoft, Dell, HP have leveraged this strength of India. The second factor was the emergence of some Indian techno-preneurs who worked with these companies and saw the opportunity, typical examples being Talisma and Vcustomer. Typically, these are high volume, L1 and L2 support targeted at the consumers. Popular outsourced services include hardware/software support, ISP support, website support, e-mail/chat based support, trouble ticket generation and remote monitoring with clients now increasingly demanding. This support is centered around customer centricity, operating efficiencies and cost effectiveness.

Top 15 and Emerging 7 COMPANIES in Tech Support & Help Desk Companies No of people in Tech Support Wipro Spectramind 2,200 VCustomer 1,900 24/7 700 EXL 700* Daksh 700 HCL BPO 400 Tracmail 250 Infowavz 200 Efunds 150 MsourcE 50 *Estimated

Captives Doing Tech Support from India:

AOL  CA  Cadence  Cisco  Dell  D-Link  GE  HP  Honeywell  Microsoft Oracle

MNC BPOs Doing Tech Support:

Sykes Teleperformance Vertex 7C Convergys  ClientLogic Teletech Sitel Corp  LiveBridge  Accenture IBM EDS Logica ACS Exult Deloitte Consulting CG E&Y

On the other hand, the flag bearers of outsourced enterprise help desk services have been the IT services giants. They have long been delivering a mix of offshore and onshore tech support services to their clients as a part of their IT services offerings. These included mostly L2 and L3 support services as part of their solutions for clients. These support depends predominantly on hardware and/or software prowess. With IT services companies joining the BPO fray, a convergence is on.

Today, Indian offshore companies, MNC software services companies, as well as MNC contact center companies all have chosen India to provide these services out of. Incidentally, all the examples mentioned in the first paragraph are already in India.

VCustomer, which started out as a tech support company and remains so deriving around 60 per cent of its total revenues of $ 15 million from tech-support 2002-03. On the other hand there are companies like EXL that started off with a major focus on transaction processing but now get about 20 percent of their revenues offering services ranging from application software support to network user management/support. The no. 2 BPO company in the BPOrbit ranking, Wipro Spectramind has 2200 people (which forms around 22 percent of their total agents) dedicated to voice-based tech support services. BPO companies like Daksh have built global equity providing tech support to global giants dealing in computing products and financial software. Most of the companies in our list of Top 15 and Emerging 7 do provide these services. A lot of smaller companies also do provide tech support services. From e-mail, today the support has moved to a mix of voice and e-mail.

The companies that bank heavily on India includes HP (Vcustomer), Dell (captive and Spectramind), and Microsoft (Convergys and a host of small players).

There are around 15 third-party MNC BPO companies who offer offshore technical support to either their clients’ customers or to the clients themselves. These include almost all the global majors in the BPO space offering both voice and Web-based technical support. The past couple of years have also seen several global leaders and MNCs, most of them in the technology space, setting up their captive units for offering IT helpdesk and tech support services to their parent’s customers across the globe. For example, Microsoft is planning to build one of the largest BPO clusters in the country involving around 9,000 professionals. It has commenced its pilot BPO project—Microsoft Global Product Support Centre (GPSC) in May this year at Bangalore, and is now embarking on full-fledged BPO operations. The operations here have the mandate to support around 54 million users across Microsoft’s product line, which includes Win Office, Win Server systems and .NET. Currently there are around a dozen MNC captive BPO units, most of them based out of Bangalore with Hyderabad slowly catching up as another favourite destination for BPO company looking for technical talent.

Though there have been some doubts after the reported decision of Dell to shift jobs back, this is one area that India can remain most bullish about, especially on the enterprise help desk front.