HfS Buyers Guide: The 2011 Offshore Challengers

The offshore challengers are a unique group of service providers that continue to build their reputations as go-to companies for buyers that want to improve asset and process efficiency while reducing total cost of ownership. Moreover, they are not usual suspects – Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, and HCL. The challengers are smaller in a number of ways including revenues, scale, and service offerings. But they did not grow to be multi-million dollar companies by happenstance. Through strong partnerships, flexible delivery models, and specialization, these companies continue to compete and win engagements from their larger competitors.

Who are these year’s challengers? They are a diverse set of ITO and BPO providers with strong management capabilities and the desire to grow their revenue streams by x2, x3, and, at times, x5 in a very short period of time. They are investing in new and enhanced services and tools, new clients, and new/adjacent verticals. Moreover, they have energetic management teams focused on operational excellence and strong partnerships. In short, they are all qualified organizations.

Through experience, HfS understands that Buyers of outsourcing services (e.g., staff that monitor and evaluate service provider offerings including procurement, IT, and business process, and business unit managers) spend a number of hours reading and reviewing provider offerings. Even with this data, a service provider’s capabilities may be difficult to ascertain. As such, HfS has summarized key facts and distilled what we believe to be the challenger’s most relevant operational and financial information. Moreover, we have highlighted a number of these attributes and their impact on each challenger’s service delivery model.