India Inc.
By Paul Harris
India-based training suppliers are leading the global outsourcing charge.
In four modern buildings in Delhi, India, 600 individuals are busily developing e-learning content for corporate customers from the United States and other countries. In several other cities, including Mumbai, hundreds more do the same.
They work for NIIT, one of India’s largest learning companies. They also are part of a fast-growing segment of “India Inc.,” the term used to describe the country’s phenomenal rise in business process outsourcing (BPO) services that have become part of everyday life for Americans.
Custom content development is nothing new for the 25-year-old NIIT, which counts Sears, SkillSoft, and Microsoft among its longstanding customers. But the company’s stake in the U.S. corporate learning marketplace is new. With its acquisition last summer of technology trainer Element K, which followed its 2003 purchase of Cognitive Arts, NIIT has suddenly become a major provider of corporate training services in the United States.
Call it offshoring, outsourcing, or the latest term, “global sourcing,” but there’s no denying that India-based knowledge BPO companies such as NIIT are becoming an increasingly visible part of the worldwide learning landscape. That’s not surprising, considering its ability to harness a skilled and inexpensive labor force to provide custom content and other learning services at attractive prices. Other prominent players include Tata Interactive Systems, Aptech, Techbooks, Brainvisa Technologies, and Genpact, just to name a few. All are eager to serve corporate customers either directly or indirectly through training outsourcing providers.
Custom content development
Business is good. On the whole, India-based content providers and instructional designers are enjoying a compounded annual growth rate in excess of 30 percent. Fueling this surge is increasing worldwide demand for custom e-learning content—more of it with interactive simulation. And while Indian firms are clearly not the only offshore providers of such knowledge-based services, their prominence is unmatched.
Statistics on the sector’s precise growth are hard to come by. But according to a study by the Confederation of Indian Industry, the broad sector of knowledge process outsourcing—of which content development is but a small part—is enjoying a compounded annual growth rate of 46 percent, and will hit $17 billion by 2010. Of that figure, $12 billion will be outsourced to India.
Aptech, NIIT, and Tata were each named to TrainingOutsourcing.com’s 2006 list of the top 20 companies in the training outsourcing industry. It is the first appearance for Aptech and Tata on the annual list that recognizes global training providers that are affecting the training BPO industry. Another India-based training company, NIS Sparta, was recently named to TrainingOutsourcing.com’s 2006 list of emerging leaders in training outsourcing.
Along with price advantages for custom content development, there are sound reasons for India’s emergence as a BPO resource, especially in the United States. Its Westernized culture identifies with the current American lifestyle; its English-speaking population values education; and its democratic, free-market government respects intellectual property. For U.S. customers, that creates a level of trust that is unmatched by China, Russia, and certain other countries.
Yet the Indian BPO market can be an intimidating one for American training organizations, says Doug Harward, founder and CEO of TrainingOutsourcing.com. Typical fears include bridging cultural barriers, managing a critical process, and dealing with inevitable delays caused by chronic employee turnover, and long distance issues, he says. “These business relationships are usually driven by the executive team and not by training managers who are forced to make them work,” claims Harward.
But the impressive growth of Indian training companies demonstrates that those hurdles are being successfully cleared. “Trainers are overcoming the myth of offshoring,” says Harward. His advice to buyers: “You’re not being objective if you don’t at least get some quotes from these companies. It’s naïve not to give them a look.” However, Harward also cautions: Labor costs for Indian companies are steadily increasing and their cost advantages will erode over time.
Harward’s advice is echoed by Raj Ramachandran, senior advisor at TPI, a Texas-based global sourcing advisory company. He says that while issues such as employee turnover among BPO firms are a legitimate concern, there are ways to handle them. He says U.S. firms also are lured by the “amazing work ethic” of Indian employees and the steady improvements in quality.
Ramachandran views the expansion into learning services by offshore companies as a logical extension of knowledge-based outsourcing portfolios that have long included information technology. It also follows the growth of transactional HR services, such as payroll and benefits, especially as HRO contracts come up for renewal.
“Currently, we see more traction in HR-plus-learning than in standalone learning BPO,” he says. But that imbalance is rapidly shrinking as more clients look to expand the scope of outsourced learning beyond the HR function, he reports.
Three market strategies
To pursue new business, Indian BPO firms are generally choosing among three business strategies. One is to build through acquisition the expertise and presence needed to deliver end-to-end services—the NIIT-Element K approach.
Another strategy is to possess sufficient training service capabilities in-house and sell them directly to clients who are leveraged off a large consulting business—a tactic thus far reserved for industrial giant Tata Interactive, India’s largest company.
The third strategy is to establish joint ventures with other training providers in a hybrid offering. This increasingly popular arrangement typically includes a U.S. training outsourcing provider to serve as an enterprise consulting partner that controls strategy, curriculum, and project management.
One such joint venture recently formed between RWD Technologies in Baltimore and Aptech. The venture centered around one of RWD Technologies major automotive customers.
Daniel A. Cantwell, RWD’s vice president of performance solutions services, says Aptech operates as the training outsourcing provider’s offshore partner for content development. He says RWD began its relationship with Aptech in January 2006 and proceeded cautiously as the partners worked through many cultural issues and other concerns. Happily, says Cantwell, “culture was not as big an issue as I thought it would be.” Another pleasant discovery was Aptech’s strong project management culture that dovetailed nicely with RWD’s.
Cantwell says the relationship is virtually transparent to the customer, which is the way it should be. “What’s not transparent is the cost savings they derive from it—about 30 percent.” He says the partnership enables RWD to hire talent that in the United States would be extremely costly in the price-sensitive learning marketplace. What’s more, he adds, the RWD customer “doesn’t have to go through the pain of developing and maintaining a relationship with the offshore provider. We take care of that.”
Cantwell says RWD hopes to expand the offshoring of content development to existing clients with Aptech or other partners, and to jointly pursue growth opportunities in new markets such as China.
Aptech is equally bullish about the relationship. Senior Vice President Suresh Narayanan says that hybrid ventures with RWD and other learning companies demonstrate the promise of the consortium approach in content development. Not only does the model bring value to the customer, but the synergistic relationships enable all participating vendors to expand their reach in today’s global sourcing environment, he insists.
Narayanan says the approach typically includes at least three components— the enterprise partner, the content developer, and a content library provider such as SkillSoft. “A consortium can bring in partners on an asneeded basis, like a constellation with planets floating in orbit,” he says.
He believes the message for corporate training organizations is clear: The e-learning content development universe is more about managing digital assets than creating instructional courses for performing a job. “In today’s world of converging media, such as iPods and cellular telephones, it’s important to leverage digital assets from product design to rollout,” he says. Tech-savvy content developers, such as Aptech, are poised to exploit this strategy, he says.
Another hybrid partnership has been formed between Dallas-based BPO provider Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) and Techbooks in Fairfax, Virginia. With its recent acquisition of Intellinex from Ernst & Young, ACS is aggressively pursuing content development and other learning opportunities, claims Richard G. Klingshirn, executive managing director of ACS Global Learning. Techbooks owns Maximize Learning, a content outsourcing company based in Pune, India. Klingshirn says that the selection of Techbooks to serve clients followed a lengthy evaluation of offshore providers.
His company was impressed with the vendor’s thoughtful processes and willingness to make commitments to training and travel. “Techbooks maintains standards to communicate, measure, and monitor performance—procedures that are important to American companies,” he says.
More than content
Although custom content development is clearly the biggest market for Indian suppliers, an array of niche learning services also is luring U.S. customers to India. Expertus, a Mountain View, California-based training services company with facilities in Chennai, India, offers technology and content support, backoffice administration, and analytical skills. It employs hundreds of consultants and specialists and promises to become partners with its corporate customer rather than merely a final destination for the product or service.
The vendor claims it can do so because two of the company’s three founders earned their master’s degrees at Oklahoma State University, and thus are able to blend an American understanding of customer needs with an ability to manage the outsourced Indian mindset. “We call it ‘transformational’ rather than transactional outsourcing, since we partner to leverage all strengths for a customer’s success,” says co-founder and CEO Ramesh Ramani.
He says Expertus provides tailored solutions for its global clients, including training of channel partners, customers, and employees. It typically serves several training organizations within a corporation, each one an individual client with unique needs. In all cases, it seeks to align training to revenue goals, says Mohana Radhakrishnan, vice president of client services.
Another U.S. company with Indian roots is Instancy, a developer of a next generation web platform that brings learning and knowledge management together in an outsourced model. Instancy’s flexible portal framework enables customers to configure their own on-demand knowledge portals to create a blended workplace learning and knowledge sharing environment, says founder and CEO Harvey Singh. The portal framework includes web and mobile device interfaces, such as Smart- Phone, PDA or BlackBerry, iPod, and TabletPC, he says.
Meanwhile, the large content developers are working hard to expand their reach with customers. At NIIT, for example, developing e-learning and classroom-based content is a natural extension of a business launched in 1981 to train Indian nationals in the burgeoning field of IT. NIIT continues to train more than 500,000 individuals seeking IT skills at 3,800 centers in 33 countries.
Other corporate learning activities include platform hosting and maintenance, training delivery, and assessment. Its specific customers are technology companies, and organizations in the publishing and higher education fields and the general corporate market.
Ashish Basu, president of NIIT’s knowledge solutions business, says that with the acquisition of Element K, its U.S.-related training business now represents more than 50 percent of the company’s revenue. NIIT intends to retain the Element K brand and its U.S.-based sales force, which deals directly with customers. .
At Tata Interactive, a range of learning and consulting services is available to bluechip clients that number more than 300. Among its offerings is a tailored suite of e-learning products as varied as mechanical engineering and management consultancy.
Lost in translation
When it comes to engaging Indian vendors, the biggest challenge for U.S. companies involves bridging culture and communications gaps. Although English is the primary language of both countries, difficulties often surface in unexpected places.
Mastering the art of American slang is a constant struggle for any offshore BPO vendor, but custom content developers also face additional challenges. In designing online content and hosted platforms, for example, the selection of colors is critical for customers. But the perception of many colors differs in the United States and India, according to Harward. “You might specify the color red and the product will come back in a pastel because Indians don’t prefer the bold colors that Americans do,” he explains.
In addition, says TPI’s Ramachandran, “You’ll get a lot of ‘yes sirs’ from India, even when requests can’t possibly be met. I call it ‘lost in translation.’” He explains that the Indian culture places great respect on authority, meaning Indian people are always eager to please their clients. That can result in delays and missed deadlines for important projects unless oversight is diligent, he says.
The answer to such problems involves capable project management and constant communication, especially the ability to head off potential areas for misunderstanding. Individuals placed at the point of customer interaction must set expectations with a full understanding of both cultures, outsourcing vendors agree. That means enforcing deadlines and convincing an over-eager Indian team not to promise things they can’t deliver.
At Aptech, design specification documents establish clear and precise expectations in an offshoring relationship, says Arun Nemani, director of sales. Such documentation gains buy-in by stakeholders as the relationship is established, and also covers terms such as project management. He recommends having expectations tested and documented, with a mediator present to bridge cultures.
A more fundamental problem is the growing competition for talent in India that has created wage inflation of 15 to 20 percent per year, which is a concern for outsourcing companies and customers alike. Labor costs in India for many knowledge workers have reportedly risen to $8 per hour, up from $3 to $4 not long ago. That translates to a $25 to $50 per hour contract price, which still compares favorably with a $75-per-hour price in the United States.
NIIT’s Basu explains that the wage inflation issue affects customers more on the high end of salaries. “In the United States, the gap between a new hire and someone with 10 years experience is roughly 100 percent, while in India it’s significantly larger,” he says. “So while Indian salaries can average half of those paid in the United States, the lower end is still much lower.”
ACS executive Klingshirn says that for Indian companies battling wage inflation and turnover, “the biggest challenge is to maintain the right amount of instructional design talent to serve customers.” That’s partly because there is not a huge pool of instructional design talent in India to begin with, he says. Yet turnover on the learning front is not as dramatic as it is for technology workers, he believes.
What advice do corporate training executives have for companies about Indian content development providers? For starters, they should test the relationships with pilot projects before making the final selection, suggests Katrina L. Branting, e-learning project leader at the DuPont’s Global Learning division. That’s what her department did before selecting two vendors more than a year ago to provide content for use throughout the company.
Another suggestion: Begin the alliance with small learning projects to get the relationship off the ground and plan extra time for their completion. “And be prepared for a steep learning curve,” she says.
For DuPont, unexpected items included the need for much more time from subject matter experts than the e-learning staffers had considered. “It was a new experience for us to live off of somebody else’s schedule for weekly phone calls and quick turnaround,” says Branting.