WHAT'S UP

In less than a month from now, Prayag will be four years old. The four years have been eventful, exciting, and full of learning; Prayag has grown in different dimensions during this period. From a fledgling advisory firm, Prayag has morphed into a full fledged advisory cum outsourcing firm focused exclusively on the high tech industry.

Prayag's team has the capability to work as an extended part of the client's management as well as roll up their sleeves and work on operational initiatives. Prayag is today engaged with its clients in different ways – providing advisory services on business strategy, organization structure, business diversification and expansion through to being an outsourcing partner for marketing and business development support. Through a combination of experience gleaned from servicing over 30 clients, interactions with hundreds of industry contacts and a relentless focus on systems and processes within, Prayag has expanded as well as honed its delivery capabilities.

We recently created a forum called Confluence to share some of our experiences and expertise with the industry, as well as to provide an opportunity for marketing professionals to interact with industry thought leaders. We have successfully completed two editions of the forum at Bangalore and have been encouraged by the participation and outcome.

In this edition of Confluence we present excerpts from the first 2 seminars.

While it is now established that offshoring is here to stay, Indian companies, especially the emerging ones, are still trying to grapple with creating a relatively unique position for themselves in the global marketspace. To hear it straight from the horse's mouth, we invited the senior management from Infosys, Wipro and Sonata to participate in a panel discussion on how each of their organizations is gearing up to the emerging reality of “Offshoring becoming mainstream”. The excerpts of this panel discussion are presented in the “Future Gazers”. With offshoring gaining in prominence and bigger deals coming offshore, it makes business sense for service providers to go after longer term outsourcing contracts as opposed to transactional projects. But this means that they need some minimum scale and breadth of capabities. With competition intensifying from all quarters and buyer interest being at a high, companies do not always have the luxury of building scale or competencies organically. And hence the recent flurry of activity seen in the areas of strategic alliances and partnerships.

This was in fact the topic for discussion in our recently concluded Confluence Forum. More about this in the “In the eye” section.

The last 2 quarters have certainly signaled the revival of the global IT industry. E-business is back in the reckoning; spurred by the success of the amazons, ebays and several online travel portals, a new set of companies from industries such as online bill payment, jewelry, telecom, software and real estate are hoping to make their mark in the second wave. Silicon Valley startups are back in business – funding activity has picked up with $1.2 B, spread across 212 companies, being invested last quarter in valley startups.

Closer home, the strong results announced by leading
IT companies are yet another manifestation of the global revival. The “Deal Beat” section presents some interesting statistics that further proves the point.

That marketing and branding should form an integral part of business strategy is well known and the reality in most industries. But, what is the reality in a blossoming industry like the global offshoring industry? And, more specifically, how much emphasis have Indian IT companies laid on this important function? Prayag found out through a study of marketing practices of IT and BPO companies. The results were quite interesting, to say the least! Excerpts from the study are presented in the section
“Best and the rest”.

Finally, the BPO industry in India is growing rapidly and we thought a closer look at some of the numbers and trends would be useful. Read the Topline Bottomline section to know more.