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The $20-billion Indian business process management (BPM) sector is heading towards another makeover, where BPM services would be delivered to clients 'as a service'.
The transformation to become the business process-as-a-service (BPaaS) segment had begun soon after the BPM sector evolved from being a basic voice services provider called business process outsourcing (BPO). The new face of the BPM sector could mean clients "consuming services like they consume manufactured goods," stalwarts believe.
'As-a-service' refers to a licensing and delivery model in which offerings are licensed on a subscription basis and centrally hosted. The 'as-a-service' model has caught up almost all aspects of information technology (IT), including software, infrastructure and products.
"More than 50 per cent of what we used to do a few years ago is not done today. We moved on, and we have still grown. If we did not do that as an industry, we would have been extinct. Going forward, we believe clients should be able to buy services like they buy manufactured goods," said Pramod Bhasin, vice-chairman at Genpact. For example, if they want finance, payroll, accounting, compliance, supply chain, analytics, or anything else, they should be able to buy these in small pieces, big pieces, or however they wish, he said.
"We have all those counters in the industry, but we just have to go out and sell those differently. We are not doing it as yet because we have been getting a lot of growth already without the current model. But I think over the next few years, we all will get there. When you pick up only one portion of the process, you are leaving the client with a lot of baggage. So clients will love the BPaaS model," added Bhasin during the two-day BPM Summit by the National Association of Software and Services Companies, which started here on Tuesday.
Rohit Kapoor, vice-chairman and chief executive officer of EXL Service, agrees. He says as BPM companies mature and gain domain expertise, the BPaaS model will become vital, as BPM providers would not perform isolated stacks of work but have complete ownership of the underlying technology and platform, and provide services on top of that.
While not many players are currently carrying out delivery of business process as-a-service, there are certain areas where the early signs of evolution have started reflecting.
Gurgaon-based legal process outsourcing firm UnitedLex is one such example. The company's Global Chief Operating Officer Pavan Vaish says, keeping in mind clients' low budgets for spending on technology relating to legal process, his company is offering it on a hosted basis.
"We sell to law firms, and this has happened to us. We are providing all the technology on a hosted basis to these law firms and other clients," said Vaish, one of the pioneers of the BPO sector who co-founded Daksh eServices (it was later sold to IBM).
"The advantage that we have is that most law firms and companies don't have the money to invest in technology on the legal side. So we are trying to use technology and becoming an enabler in that sense."
Even as the change seems inevitable, it might happen gradually, as the sector is witnessing high growth with its present delivery model, Bhasin said.
