Global economic pressures conditions have given rise to increased competitive and regulatory pressures on businesses. Decision making times have shrunk and time to market has shortened for most. Analytics forms an increasingly important part of every decision-making process.

India has matured as the preferred outsourcing destination, and this has fortified the belief of outsourcers in high-end knowledge processing work such as data analytics. Analytics outsourcing traditionally started with the financial and marketing function. However the increase in volumes of data across industries and functions such as shipping and logistics, manufacturing, supply chain, are driving further demand.

Use of India-based resources for Analytics outsourcing has been rapidly growing due to the following factors:

  • Availability of high-end analytics skills: India has developed a significant pool of data-analytics specialists and many global corporations have set up captive KPO units in India.
  • Leverage cost advantage: Availability of highly skilled data analytics talent in India at a lower cost than onshore resources. Analytics outsourcing to India helps companies make savings of 30%, through labor arbitrage, and by reducing the need for companies to invest in data analytics technologies and infrastructure.
  • Automation efficiencies: Indian outsourcing providers have the abilities to offer certain efficiencies in terms of automation. They have the ability to automate almost 70% of the data analytics process with the right set of solutions.
  • Account level relationship: The large SIs offering these kinds of service are keen to expand their reach into key accounts by providing analytics services.

Companies offering analytics outsourcing from India include multi-nationals like Accenture and Capgemini, and India-based firms including Genpact, TCS Analytics and WNS.

PAC View

PAC sees several trends in analytics outsourcing driving the market forward:

  • Traditional business process outsourcers will build industry specific analytics capabilities combined with business consulting services.
  • Industry specific analytics capabilities which will be of increasing interest, including social intelligence / mining; predictive analytics, such as fraud analytics in financial services and insurance, churn in mobile telecoms customers and predicted student dropout patterns in higher education; and smart-metering related analytics in energy/utilities.
  • Unstructured data from social networks, emails, and text documents will need to be analyzed in conjunction with structured, quantitative data.
  • With the adoption of platforms and applications on the cloud, analytics-as-a-service, or data-integration-as-a-service will be increasingly attractive.

Post by Rajeev Suman