Accenture's 5,000-seater BPO facility in Bangalore used to support largely internal HR needs till a year ago. Now, the company has evolved its offerings across a range of verticals and sub-verticals. Applications in areas like e-procurement, e-learning solutions, managed messaging services, outsourced HR back-office work, and customer analytics for the life insurance segment and real estate management are seeing Accenture's ITeS operations leveraging the company's domain and software development expertise.

More than doubling its total employee strength (BPO, services and consulting) from around 1,900 in March 2003 to 4,300 by December, Accenture finished off fiscal 2004 with over 5,000 people on its rolls in Bangalore and Mumbai as well as its IT services center in Hyderabad. Presently serving more than 100 clients (80 in March 2004) on the IT and BPO fronts, Accenture's recruitment target of 10,000 employees by end-2004 would not seem far off. In fact, the company has been recruiting over 250 people every month since December 2003. Outsourcing and BPO activities accounted for most of the hirings.