On March 25, in the presence of its Chairman, Sir Mike Rake, BT Group, Ben Verwaayen, CEO - BT Group and other British Telecommunications executives, the company declared that it would soon be opening a Global Operations Centre at Gurgaon, India.

This Global Operations Centre is expected to employ at least 300 highly skilled professionals. They will run systems and processes for the various BT lines of business besides providing functional support to Group functions such as Legal, HR, Finance, and Procurement.

At the opening, CEO Ben Verwaayen, stated that India was a critical market for the company’s global growth strategy. He remarked upon its supportive government, highly skilled workforce and global competence. “Only companies who recognize and harvest talent on a global basis will achieve a new level of competitive advantage,” he said.

The BT Global Operations Centre is expected to satisfy the company’s present and future resourcing requirements.

This centre has been described as part of BT’s global sourcing strategy in which BT sets up global centers of excellence in various locations in accordance with local talent and expertise. BT already has similar centers in China, Brazil and Hungary.

Besides its global customers, however, BT is also homing in on India’s domestic market with its services. BT Telecom India, a joint venture majority owned by BT, received licenses from the Indian government In February 2007 a joint venture, BT Telecom India was licensed by the Indian government for the operation of both, national and international long-distance services.
According to company sources, BT provides its Indian clients with VPN services employing IP, MPLS and ATM technologies, and also addresses the networked IT service requirements of its multinational customers.

With the company currently accounting for 2 per cent of India’s $50 billion IT and BPO exports, it anticipates sourcing a greater amount in the near future.

Reportedly there are over 40 organizations, in India that provide IP services. These include subsidiaries of multinational companies and third party vendors.

Among the Intellectual Property services that are being offshored to India is Prior Art Searches.

This could be a highly technical and complex matter or it could be a “routine” search. No matter the type, these searches are expected to accurately summarize relevant portions of prior art and save you time.
[Read more →]

Among the rapidly growing number of legal service providers in India, Manthan Services, in Bangalore is one of the best established and largest companies. Taking pride in the fact that the enterprise, started by Mr. Gururaj Potnis who is also the head of the BPO Division, and Mohit Kataria, now director of legal services, in 2003, retained 120 employees earlier , it now boasts of employing360 professionals.
It has customers from across the US (where it works with more than 85 law firms in 30 states), Canada and UK, several of them being Legal 500 firms, and extends Legal, Paralegal and Secretarial services to them.
[Read more →]

If you were a Hawaiian one of the most common words you might use is ‘wiki’ which means ‘faster’. Now, if you are a web visitor you might use the word too, for another reason. One reason the word is used on the net is because you can learn to use the tool very, very quickly.
So what is wiki?
[Read more →]

On March 12 Bill Gates was in Washington to participate in the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the United States House Committee on Science and Technology.
Although the committee has no jurisdiction over immigration, Gates could not but discuss immigration and the H-1B visa situation since he believes in the link between American technology competitiveness and American policy on foreign workers.
Pointing out that Microsoft had been unable to hire one-third of the candidates it wished to hire from overseas because of too few H1B visas, he suggested that ‘counterproductive’ US immigration policies should be overhauled so that more people (highly-skilled professionals) could enter the country on these visas.
In response to Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher’s remark about the student from India replacing the job of the American B and C student, Gates argued that it would on the contrary create jobs around the world class engineers and thus create employment for ‘B’ and ‘C’ American students.
[Read more →]

Last month E-Legal World announced that their new multi-language suite of top-tier internet legal services would now be available for the worldwide legal community.
E-Legal World has committed itself to creating superior but user friendly on-line services and products for the legal community. The suite consists of six services of which Live Lawyer is one. Developed by lawyers themselves, as a tool to be used by legal professionals with their clients, it is described as a “Secure Video Conferencing and Client Management System.” It guarantees that it will provide all the tools legal professionals will need to use their time more productively and help cut expenses as well as help legal professionals build more than satisfactory client bases. All it requires to be operative is an Internet connection. Lawyers can also include the secure text chat feature, besides sending and or receiving confidential files privately and securely in the course of an audio/video conference. They can also do this on their own without having to use voice and video.
[Read more →]

Now that we are aware that Indian offshore outsourcing companies have been the recipients of about 80% of the H-1B visas for the program’s top 10 participants in 2007, let’s take a closer look at how they were allocated.

The lion’s share, amounting to 4,559, went to Bangalore’s Infosys Technologies (INFY). That was followed by Wipro, also Bangalore based, with 2,567 visa petitions approved. (Of its 9,000 employees in the United States, Infosys has 7,500 employees on H-1B visas, while Wipro has 4,000 employees in the U.S of which 2,500 are on H-1B visas).

The other 2007 visa recipients included UST Global and Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH) both of which are based in the U.S. but operate from India.
Only two American companies, Microsoft (MSFT) and Intel (INTC) figured in the to p 10. Whereas Microsoft obtained 959 visa petition approvals, Intel had to be satisfied with 369.
In spite of this American tech businesses are asking Congress to increase the number of visas from 65,000 a year to a minimum of 115,000.
This is sure to cause much heartburn with critics already accusing the outsourcers of abusing the American program. While the visas are expected to help boost the U.S. economy they feel they are doing the opposite by eliminating jobs and thus chipping away at the American economy. They feel the program’s standards can be tightened were the companies first be obliged to attempt employing Americans and also be obligated to guarantee that American personnel will not be supplanted by these visa employees.
Two senior legislators, Senators Grassley and Durbin have already initiated legislation for overhauling the H-1B and L-1 visa programs with the aim of giving American workers priority and of cracking down on unprincipled companies that dispossess eligible Americans of high-skill jobs.
Companies are now being asked to reveal details of the number of visas they hold, the wages paid, what efforts have been made to recruit eligible American workers, and whether any American workers have experienced the outsourcing of their responsibilities.
In their defense these two leading companies, Infosys and Wipro have declared earlier on that they are not misusing the program. In the past, they’ve said the jobs they fill in the U.S. are higher skilled than those in India, and involve custom software development and sales.

In its latest issue, BusinessWeek has reported that most of the offshore outsourcing companies granted H-1B visas last year were Indian ones, accounting for about 80% of the visa petitions that were approved for the program’s top 10 participants.
This follows requests to Congress by technologically advanced companies to augment the yearly allotment of H-1B visas, whereby highly educated foreigners can temporarily work in the United States.
But this is not likely to go down well with certain critics, however, who believe that this is helping to wipe out jobs for Americans. They claim that these companies low-cost workers are brought to the United. States, trained, and then returned home a year or two later from where they provide tech support and other services from abroad.
[Read more →]

With increased taxes, the increased costs of labor, production, and various other direct or indirect expenses, numerous countries are looking at outsourcing today even if perhaps they looked at it with jaundiced eyes a few years ago.
With the improvement of economies of developing countries like India, American and European countries are now seriously considering outsourcing their blue collar and protracted jobs in order to allow themselves more time and greater opportunities to concentrate on areas of their main expertise. Thus they are able to look at improving their marketing, expanding, and consider mergers and takeovers.
But in order to be successful at it and to get full satisfaction from it, it is very necessary to find the right firm to outsource to. Such companies should be reliable, well-equipped with qualified staff, and should be able to produce results on time. They should be experienced in handling overseas projects with minimum supervision and must be very cost-effective, which is the main objective for outsourcing in the first place. Only if the price factor remains constant and unchanging for a decent period of time and there is no confusion about the agreed pricing would it be worth it.
[Read more →]

Legalwise Outsourcing Inc. has introduced offshore legal outsourcing services to the Canadian market. It is expected to lower the expense of bluecollar legal tasks by offering offshore legal services across Canada.
Canadian lawyer and founder of Legalwise, Gavin Birer, has been quoted as saying, “……we’re finally giving law firms and in-house lawyers across the country access to the types of services the rest of the world has been using for several years…… It’s a model that makes perfect sense in an age where businesses are demanding greater value for their money from their lawyers.”
Legalwise clients have access to about 430 fully trained and qualified lawyers in Mumbai and Pune (India). Any qualms about services rendered can be put to rest. Quality control is in place. Although they have varying areas of expertise and different levels of experience, the lawyers’ work is supervised and examined by lawyers in Canada.
[Read more →]