Hexaware CEO P R Chandrasekar
Indian outsourcing company Hexaware has started a fresh assault on the Australian market with a hybrid onshore-offshore sourcing model the company’s CEO says will result in locating a development centre in the region.
Headquartered in Mumbai, Hexaware started in Australia in 2008 and the initial phases involved seeding the company and determining how to position itself, but last year was good in terms of winning new customers, CEO P R Chandrasekar said.
The Asia Pacific region makes up about 10 per cent of Hexaware’s business, but Chandrasekar is focusing on the region and believes it is “a market worth going after”.
Chandrasekar said a good hybrid model for service delivery is about 25 per cent on site and 75 off shore and the company is looking at doing business at one or two “anchor clients” to give it enough business to establish a development centre in Australia.
“I was looking at that last year, but now I’m hoping to do it this year,” Chandrasekar said. “We want to hire local people and do level one support and development for the education space. We have worked with educational institutions and we have unique skill sets in that market.”
Hexaware’s core competencies are in the insurance and asset management, travel and transportation, and higher education sectors.
“We have unique skills in campus-related solutions and are working with the leading universities in Australia,” Chandrasekar said.
Chandrasekar said its local revenues are still small at around three to four million and have 50 people working for customers in Australia.
With a sales office in Sydney we will be investing in technical resources in Australia.
“Australia is a market place where there is enough local talent you can leverage,” he said. “We have launched an ERP shared service offering and have three customers here in Australia.”
Hexaware’s “shared service” is a price-per-support model so customers can pay as they go, irrespective of the skill set they require.
“The advantage of this model is if you are a very large user you can afford to do new business with shared services with costs down 25 to 30 percent,” Chandrasekar said. “We can aggregate the volume so it makes it cost effective.”
Hexaware’s country manager for Australia Saravana Rengan said there is interest among local enterprises for end-to-end support in a hybrid on-site and off-site model.
“We are getting traction with companies that have many applications where we can offer multiple services,” Rengan said.
Hexaware has partnered with SAP and Oracle for application testing and BPO services, which Chandrasekar says are unique in local market.
With some 5250 people - about 1200 in the BPO space and the rest in IT – Hexaware has development centres in US, Europe, Mexico and China, in addition to those in India.
“We do all the things traditional IT services people do like application development, maintenance and support, and anout 10 per cent of business is coming from BI and we have a partnership with Greenplum. We even have mainframe capabilities,” Chandrasekar said.
“Over the last few years the global development capability has enhanced so you don't have to sell the whole notion of global sourcing. Establishing a critical mass is the challenge a smaller company like us has. People need to know if you are serious about being here and we now have sufficient reason to be more bold about what we can offer in Australia.”
Chandrasekar says compared with other markets, Australia is easier to enter as the language and business climate is familiar.
Hexaware plans to hire 50 people this year, increasing the number of people servicing the local market to 150. About 30 per cent of new hires will be based locally.
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