Avasant Senior Partner and Global CEO Kevin Parikh has billions of dollars of deals in outsourcing and business transactions under his belt in his career. Avasant works with governments and Fortune 500 companies to not only source skilled workers, but to optimize technology in a way that saves them money and time. Avasant is seeing some pretty impressive growth; 2012 saw a 35 percent jump in revenue, and midway through 2013 that number is already at 43 percent, and the firm has conducted more than 1,000 engagements in 40 countries. Parikh shared his insights with Consulting One on One about trends in the BPO market, what clients are looking for, and how Avasant makes it happen for them.
Consulting: What are some of the big trends in global outsourcing these days?
Parikh: An overall trend to take advantage of outsourcing from a corporate social responsibility standpoint. In fact, Avasant was recently asked by the Rockefeller Foundation to support an initiative called impact sourcing. What impact sourcing does is target rural and socioeconomically deprived regions around the world and looks for ways to improve skills and identify those locations or individuals as impact sourcing beneficiaries. What that means is we're looking for areas in our companies, which are primarily Fortune 500 clients, they're looking for corporate responsibility tools and impact sourcing is one of them when they outsource. We're also seeing more outsourcing in the public sector. That's taking place not so much offshore like many would assume, but taking place in local cities with private companies that are North America based. The third, is still global offshoring, to take advantage of labor arbitrage overseas and using skilled workers from an IT and business process standpoint. The only difference here is we're not just looking at countries like India today, but our clients are looking to outsource to various emerging market locations, including those in Latin America and Eastern European locations.
Consulting: What big challenges are clients facing?
Parikh: If you're looking at it from a business process outsourcing standpoint versus an IT outsourcing standpoint it's always the same thing. One is skills availability and finding the right resource set at the right price point. The reason clients are looking to outsource is not what most people think, it's not just to save money. They actually want better service and the service provided for them in a more efficient way. Price of course is one of the factors. I think when I look at outsourcing and what's driving government and private sector alike it's cost reduction and improvement in service and their ability to focus on their core competencies. If you're in government you might want to focus on fire and police and other community services. Providing BPO or a call center or IT support service is not necessarily core to your mission.
Consulting: What are some of the big market opportunities?
Parikh: One of the biggest trends in our industry is data analytics and cloud services. The ability for clients to look at big data within their own organizations and be able to monetize the data in their organizations in a way that can support their customers better. We're seeing that for the first time in a very powerful way. The other aspect is cloud services. You see the rise of cloud email systems like Office 365 and Google Mail. You also see an increase in the cloud services for sales like Salesforce and others. Cloud services are now really a key focus for most of our customers as they look into outsourcing. They're also looking at how they can examine their own data internally and monetize it. It might be a customer list, or buying practices of their clients so they can provide better services to their customers.
Consulting: What are clients demanding?
Parikh: Clients want the benefits of both an offshore center that is highly structured in providing value in terms of a center of excellence, as well as people that are local and can reach out and touch and provide high customer satisfaction.
Consulting: How do you keep that growth going?
Parikh: You have to hire great people and focus on customer satisfaction. Avasant is really a blue chip boutique firm. So we offer our clients a real concierge level of service. We don't just go in and deliver, we offer them a lot of value through providing them access to research and reports, complementary events and a real sort of red carpet treatment where they also have the opportunity to speak as subject matter experts and build their own sort of industry knowledge and experience through their relationship with Avasant.
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