While the offshore mating dance has turned political abroad, at home the bigger deals have not materialised too often. But with the Indian BPO services pie likely to see greater segmentation and customer loyalty being a key component in retaining business, comprehensive players who can offer end-to-end services will grow in demand once the larger contracts are tapped.

"Some of the large customers often require bundled services from the same vendor. Many Indian companies are leveraging their existing relationships to do more sophisticated and high-end work, and also becoming one-stop-shop vendors," says Nasscom president Kiran Karnik.

Shift towards integrated services:
Outsourcers are releasing that crusades to drum up business will be better served by positioning themselves as integrated service suppliers with design capabilities. But, here a majority are perched high on the iceberg's tip. "Indian companies are yet to touch the entire range of BPO services, forget mastering it," says Praveen Kankariya, CEO & president of software R&D outsourcer, Impetus Technologies. "We did and still do a very, good job in getting more and more of the BPO pie. But we need to shed our image of 'economical workers' and work towards building the image of 'intelligent workers' offering end-to-end services."

Karnik sees a large number of BPO vendors leveraging existing customer relationships to fine-tune their entire territory of services, as it results in lesser costs and management time. "At the same time, we are likely to see the birth of new, specialized niche players in this space," he hastens to add.

Today, the nascent BPO industry is largely transactional with a few scattered players in niche sectors providing solutions for a particular part of the business, says Sanjeev Aggarwal, CEO and founder of Daksh e-Services.

Adds Kankariya, "Transaction-specific and niche players will evolve into comprehensive players who strive to make interrelated processes more effective, thereby, aiming to reduce TCO (Total Costs of Operation) by introducing best practices."

Fragmented future:
As integrated outsourcers like Wipro Spectramind, Accenture, Convergys, Daksh, Transworks and WNS Global Services further work the market, BPO is expected to see domain based segmentation. Sophisticated areas that require highly skilled professionals like risk analysis, engineering design, market and equity research, clinical trials and underwriting will be new service lines.

As the US and Indian BPO markets expand to $280 billion and $6-8 billion respectively by 2008, they will split into sub-segments with clients grabbing more of the cost savings, say vendors.

Further segmentation is expected to drive more cost savings especially for clients in verticals like banking, medical claims, insurance and e-billing. "Several large Indian IT and IT service companies are further climbing the value chain by offering full architecture consultancy to clients," notes Karnik. Fastest growing segments are customer care and administration, he says.

The evolution from niche transactions to integrated services delivery across processes will see India's BPO spiders sprouting more legs, as they fine-tune their brand management skills and develop apps and products to marry data and business processes, all the while learning to use them more efficiently.