Even as growth slowed for most voice-based BPOs last year, Sutherland Globals India operations pulled off yet another good year. It scaled up, adding close to 3,000 people. The Kochi facility, opened a year earlier, now employs around 1,000 people; Chennai continues to be the biggest location with 6,500 employees spread across six facilities; followed by Mumbai with 1,500.

Technology remains the key vertical for Sutherland, contributing close to 80% of the revenue. The rest came from verticals like BFSI, telecommunications, healthcare, and retail. While the company provides services like sales, marketing, and customer support for consumer electronics, software, and IT hardware manufacturers, it offers technical help-desk support to other industries.

In the last few months it diversified into non-tech areas in enterprise back-office, where it has taken a selective approach and mostly plays on the supply chain (F&A, order management, supply chain management, analytics), which leverages its existing technology products client base, for which efficient management of global supply chains is a major strategic thrust.

Recently it got into vertical-specific BPO in selected industries such as insurance, mortgage, healthcare, and online retail.

The companys delivery model spread across strategic hubs globally, helping it offer blended offshore and nearshore services across geographies. Through this model Sutherland is able to function as a captive for its clients, and that is its unique selling point. Sutherland, like most voice players, has opened delivery facilities in the Philippines, managed out of India.

In terms of significant top management recruitments, Deepak Sogani, the long-standing CFO of Patni joined the company. In a more recent development, Vik Ranjan from AIG joined as head of BFSI.

India is a very important geography for Sutherland with 50% of its 18,000 employees based here. The company intends to add close to 4,000 more this year, and by FY 08 end may well have over 13,000 people in India. This would make it one of the biggest BPO employers in the country. DQ

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