Bharti Airtel outsources customer care

Bharti Airtel has outsourced IBM, Tech Mahindra and Spanco for providing customer care services in the 16 African countries where the telco has a presence following its acquisition of Zain Telecom early this year, writes The Times of India.

An agreement is expected to be finalised soon, Bharti Airtel said in a statement, declining to give financial details on the deal. As per the agreement, Bharti Airtel - which owns and operates the Zain brand in 16 countries across Africa - will outsource core customer services to these three firms, including call centre and back office processes.

"The outsourcing of customer service operations will play a key role in making Bharti Airtel competitive in Africa as it focuses on making mobile communications affordable," the company adds.

The popularity of cloud computing will continue to rise over the next three years, creating IT outsourcing demand, it has been claimed, says iHotDesk.

Research consultancy Gartner says cloud services exist along a spectrum from open public to closed private, and the coming years will see the delivery of a range services falling between these two extremes.

"Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor's public cloud service technologies and methodologies in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer's enterprise," the firm says, adding that many will also offer management services to remotely manage the cloud service implementation. "We expect large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing 'cloudsourcing' decisions and management," the firm states.

Infosys Technologies chairman NR Narayana Murthy says India need not be apologetic about outsourcing, as Indian IT companies add significant value to US corporations and have made them more efficient, states The Financial Express.

After revealing the Infosys Prize winners for 2010, Murthy said, “I think we add sufficient value to the corporations in the US, so therefore there is no need for us to be apologetic, or to be shy. I think we add value, there is no doubt at all, otherwise obviously we will not have any play in that market.”

Murthy was responding to a question on the relevance of US president Barack Obama's visit to India next month, and the recent anti-outsourcing wave in the US.