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Take Dataquest Top20 BPO companies. Two of themAccenture and Convergysare parts of large American companies, which were started by those companies organically to take advantage of the India advantage.Two of themTCS BPO and Syntel KPOare less than four years old. From rest of the sixteen companies, twelve have changed their names, at least once in their not-so-long history.

The oldest among these are WNS Global Services and Genpact, which started as captive units. WNS started in 1996 as a British Airways subsidiary called World Network Services, and changed its name to WNS Global in 2003, when it decided to pursue growth as an independent company. Genpact started as GE Capital International Services in 1997. When GE sold 60% of its stake to two PE playersOak Hill and General Atlanticin 2004, it changed its name to Gecis Global, before finally changing it to Genpact a year later.

Wipro BPO also owes its DNA and origin to Spectramind, started by Raman Roy in 1999. Wipro acquired majority of the company in 2002 and changed the name to Wipro Spectramind before finally changing it to Wipro BPO. While in case of Wipro, it was an acquisition, many IT companies too, which got into BPO business organically, had started with different names but changed to a more generic parent company BPO nomenclature. This includes Progeon, which Infosys started in 2002 with 20% equity from Citigroup, but in 2006 bought the latters, stake. Then the company name changed to Infosys BPO. HCL, which was one of the first IT companies among the big firms to get into BPO in 2001, started as E-Serve Technologies; first changed its name to HCL E-serve before finally falling to the formula nomenclature of HCL BPO. BPO subsidiary of MphasiS too started as MsourcE, before changing its name to MphasiS BPO. Satyams, BPO unit started as Nipuna in 2002. Five years later, it changed its name to Satyam BPO.

The trend is not only restricted to captives and subsidiaries of IT companies. Firstsource, the fifth largest BPO company in India, started as ICICI OneSource in 2002, after acquiring CustomerAsset, a Bengaluru based start-up, and FirstRing. It changed its name to Firstsource in 2006, before its listing in 2007. Another VC backed start-up, TransWorks was acquired by Aditya Birla Group, which also acquired a Canadian company, Minacs in 2006, and changed the company name to Aditya Birla Minacs a year later. Another top Indian company, Cambridge Solutions has an interesting genesis. It started as Scandent Solutions, but holding company of Scandent Solutions, Scandent Group, had also invested in a BPO start-up, ProcessMind which was started in 2002. It then brought both these companies together before acquiring the BPO arm of Aon, called Cambridge, and adopted the acquired companys name. Now, majority of the company has been acquired by UK based Xchanging, and company will change its name again to Xchanging Solutions.

Other companies that changed their names include Daksh eServices, which after being acquired by IBM became IBM Daksh; Hinduja TMT, which changed its name last year to Hinduja Global, and 24/7 Customer.com, which simply dropped the .com part from its name.

Interestingly, one company that has changed its ownership many times, but has not changed its name even once is Intelenet Global, which started as a 50-50 JV between HDFC and TCS in 1999, becoming an HDFC subsidiary for some time, and being majority owned by Barclays for some time before being acquired by Blackstone in 2007. If you are into BPO trivia, here is another fact for you. This is the only company which has not changed its non-promoter CEO since its inception in 1999. The other large BPO companies where CEOs have remained at the helm since inception are vCustomer and 24/7 Customer, but they are both promoter CEOs.

Shyamanuja Das
shyamanujad@cybermedia.co.in

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