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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JPR who wrote (3228)	11/19/1998 10:03:00 AM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12475

Fortune 500 & India- On sourcing codes and such. JPR: Check this out. Excerpts Fortune 500 club sources code from India Harshad Oke -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MUMBAI 18 November THE next time you grab that bottle of Coke, don't mistake it for an All-American Icon. It is Indian software that keeps it fizzing. Coke's in company with names like British Airways, Swissair, Alcatel, Prudential Insurance, Citicorp, American Express Bank, General Electric, GE Capital Services, PepsiCo, Intel, Informix and SAP. As many as 158 of the Fortune 500 companies either have their own software set-up or tie-ups with Indian software companies. All of them source a lot of their in-house software from India. Also, for some of them, India is where they have centralised many of their globally mission-critical operations. Coca-Cola sources a lot of its supply-chain and vendor relationship software from Tata Consultancy Services. Ditto for Prudential Insurance. According to officials in TCS, "Prudential is working with us to develop its customer interface software." "India has a great brand value in software. India was a mere low-cost player. Today, it is ahead of countries such as Ireland and Israel in the quality of software produced," says Abhas Kumar of NIIT. Industry experts said, there are a number of other low-cost alternatives such as the Philippines. The Indian allure is no longer based on the usual low-cost labour, and a technically sound English-speaking workforce. The increasing brand value of Indian software has furnished a great deal of sophistication to the software sourced. Many have spun off the centres as independent companies. For instance, two years ago, British Airways spun off its Indian software centre as a separate company World Network Services Pvt Ltd, a fully-owned subsidiary. It began by developing pre-flight and post-flight software for BA, and now sells its products to other airlines like Air Jamaica, Estonia Air and Maersk Air. BA invested £1m and began operations with 15 people. Since then, its headcount has increased to 650. According to Sanjay Tipnis of WNS, "We started off by delivering basic stuff. Now, we deliver solutions for tele sales, customer service, liaisoning with agents, reservations and revenue accounting." ....... economictimes.com