Friday, January 04, 2008 New player in local BPO industry opens, eyes more centers in RP
WIPRO Technologies, the global information technology (IT) services business of Wipro Limited, opened a business process outsourcing (BPO) center in Cebu today, as part of its strategy to build global delivery capabilities.
Wipro plans to hire more than 900 employees for its 45,000 square-foot Cebu facility, which started handling customer-focused support processes last Jan. 2.
The company is also looking at establishing additional centers in other fast-growing cities in the Philippines.
The center in Cebu will offer an exhaustive range of services to Wipro’s customers. The focus will be both on voice and non-voice business in the field of customer service support, technical support, human resource services, financial & accounting and procurement services.
Qualified talent
The global outsourcing giant chose the Philippines among several other locations due to the availability of qualified talent in the country.
“The Philippines is one of the largest English-speaking nations with a strong IT orientation and a talent pool of 29 million. This is one location that we definitely want to expand our presence in,” said T. K. Kurien, Wipro BPO president.
Wipro’s choice of Cebu as its newest BPO destination highlights the Philippines’ emergence as a leading global outsourced service hub.
Earlier this year, investment advisory firm Tholons identified Manila among the top five prime outsourcing destinations, and Cebu as one of the leading emerging global destinations for outsourced processes.
Tholon’s study also revealed that the outsourcers consider process maturity, availability of relevant skills and cost as the top reasons for deciding on the locations for IT and BPO services outsourcing.
Objective
“Our business objective is to enable delivery of multi-lingual services to our global customer base. With a strong and robust game plan for the year, we are very clear in announcing Wipro’s arrival toward global serviceability, and Philippines is a major milestone in this journey” said Sanjeev Bhatia, Wipro BPO vice president for international operations.
Wipro BPO took a quantum leap in 2002 after acquiring Spectramind which then had 3,000 employees and now employees at least 20,000 people at all its BPO centers across the globe. In 2007, the Hewitt Survey rated Wipro among the 25 best employers in India.
As a part of its global expansion strategy, Wipro has already invested in several overseas centers. In the last nine months alone, Wipro successfully setup global delivery centers in Romania and Shanghai.
