Xansa PLC, a Reading, U.K.-based IT outsourcing and business process outsourcing (BPO) company, is to increase its staff in India by 400 by April this year, taking the total number of staff in the country to about 2,000, according to an executive of the company. The firm is also building new services delivery capacity in the country.
“In India we are continuing to grow rapidly and have increased our headcount by over 50 per cent since the start of our financial year in May,” said Alistair Cox, chief executive of the company at a recent conference in Mumbai organized by the Delhi-based National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM).
Xansa’s new facilities at Noida and Chennai are already functioning and the next phase of construction of a facility at Pune is underway to deliver more seats this year. Once fully built, Xansa’s total capacity in India will provide 10,000 seats on a single-shift basis, according to the company. The firm has been operating in India since 1989, using the country as a key offshore location for services delivery.
Xansa delivers IT outsourcing and BPO services to its clients in the U.K. and U.S. using operations in the U.K. and India. The company currently employs about 6,000 people between India and the U.K.
“We have continued to increase the scope of services offered as well as the number of clients served,” said Cox. “Our focus in India is two-fold. Firstly, the delivery of integrated IT services to our clients combining skills from offshore with those already in place onshore. Secondly, the provision of high-value, complex back-office processes with the potential to move into front-office processes as our clients require.”
Anticipating growth in both its IT and BPO services business, the company is recruiting heavily to meet anticipated demand. “Growth in the BPO area has been particularly significant and we now operate 10 discrete processes offshore for a number of different clients up from one a year ago,” Cox said.
India’s IT services and BPO industry got a strong endorsement from U.K. representatives at the NASSCOM event. Addressing the conference, the U.K.’s minister of state for energy and e-commerce Stephen Timms assured Indian industry that the U.K. will not use anti-outsourcing bills and other protectionist measures that would affect outsourcing of work to India.
Outsourcing of work to India and other low-cost locations has come in for criticism from workers in both the U.K. and the U.S. The U.S. Senate passed in January an omnibus Appropriations Bill totaling US$328 billion, which contains provisions that restrict government contractors from outsourcing work overseas, which is commonly know as offshoring. Both the U.S. federal legislature and some state legislatures are considering bills that would curb outsourcing of government contracts to locations outside the U.S.