At a time when analytics is becoming more pervasive, helping businesses across various sectors, India is expected to maintain its edge over major offshore destinations that give analytics services outsourcing.
According to a recent report by financial services firm Avendus Capital, India will continue to enjoy its leadership position in analytics services over other competing regions such as China, the Philippines, eastern Europe and Latin America. The demand for the service from India will be driven by a host of factors such as availability of talent pool, maturity of the industry and wide spectrum of services.
Data analytics is the science of using raw data by extensive use of statistical and quantitative analysis for the purpose of drawing business related conclusions and for predicting business outcomes. Among the industries, banking and financial, which is one of the earliest adopters of knowledge services is the largest user of the analytics services followed by retail, healthcare and pharmaceutical industries.
According to the report, global data analytics outsourcing market in 2012 stood at $500-500 million in 2010, of which Indian service providers delivered $375 million. This accounted for 19 per cent of India’s $2 billion offshore knowledge services (KPO) market. By 2015, the data analytics market in India is expected to reach $1.15 billion to become 21 per cent of the overall Indian KPO market opportunities of $5.6 billion.
“Although this market has been around since early 2000, the exponential growth in data generation, significant decrease in data storage cost and increased need of companies to make decisions based on actionable insights, have increased the demand for data analytics services,” said Amit Singh, executive director (technology and outsourcing), Avendus Capital.
He said the US, which is the biggest market for data analytics outsourcing, is estimated to have a shortage of 140,000 – 190,000 professionals with analytical capabilities by 2018. “This talent supply gap is expected to boost demand for analytics outsourcing services which the Indian service providers could leverage on,” he said.
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The service providers’ landscape in India is split between pure-play analytics vendors, knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) services providers and the BPO services providers who also provide analytics services as a part of their offerings. Besides, global companies also source analytics services from their captive centres in India.
Among the pure-play analytics vendors, Sequoia Capital and General Atlantic-invested Mu Sigma is said to be the biggest in this space. Besides, there are about 15 different companies such as AbsolutData, Fractal Analytics, ZS Associates, LatentView and Opera Solutions who are trying to position themselves in this market.
Among the large BPO services providers, Genpact has a large analytics practice with close to $200-300 million coming from this business.