Q&A with HP’s Keith Kerrison

Kerrison: “The Nearshore will grow because we have multinational clients who want support in their time zone or want to follow the sun, but it will not grow as fast as farshore.”

By Dennis Barker

Keith Kerrison looks at the Nearshore region not in isolation but sees it for what it really is: part of the much bigger world. He’s been involved in sourcing applications projects (“mainly SAP”) for about 15 years, back when he was with Proctor & Gamble.

He came to HP as part of an outsourcing arrangement with P&G and now, as director of the Best Shore Application Services for the Americas Region within Enterprise Services, essentially has the job of running HP’s global applications delivery system. Besides being an expert on sourcing, Kerrison is also numbered among the Nearshore Americas Top 50 Power Rankings.

We asked him about global-sourcing challenges, the Nearshore region, what it takes to make clients happy, and Canada.

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“The resistance to nearshoring has always been the assumption that India has a much stronger talent pool than nearshore options,” says CIO Steve Romeo, in the middle, joined by CIO Shaun Cooper and CIO Joanne Kossuth.

By Linda Rosencrance

For years the refrain echoing in the ears of CIOs and IT decision makers has been “do more with less.” And in today’s economic climate, that refrain rings true more than ever.

With that mandate, the question is what can CIOs do to help their companies weather these tough business conditions? And since India is more expensive than ever, what is preventing those buyers from examining Latin America more seriously.

While labor costs may be on par with India, there are fewer cultural differences when working in Latin America. And geographic proximity makes communication easier and travel less expensive and less time consuming. Yet still many IT leaders seem to be reluctant to participate in nearshoring.  Find out what three IT executives told us about why Nearshoring is not as attractive as some of us think.

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CPM Braxis Co-Founder David Shpilberg identifies the drivers that led to the creation of CPM Braxis - and why Brazil is exceptionally well-positioned to provide high value IT services to U.S. customers.

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In its Haste to Gouge India, Congress Neglects to Consider the TN Visa
By Kirk Laughlin

In what could be one of the most extraordinary examples of the self-defeating consequences of slapdash, politically inspired protectionism, the new Congressional border bill which partly takes aim at Indian outsourcers is likely to trigger a nearshoring bonanza – with Mexico poised to become a major beneficiary. But wait, isn’t Chuck Schumer (D-NY) who is a key sponsor of the bill, going to protect U.S. jobs? Actually no and we’ll explain why.

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By Tarun George

Newest in the line of “India Inc.” conquests in Latin America, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced recently the opening of a new delivery center in Lima, Peru. With centers already in Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia, TCS has the largest LatAm presence of any of its Indian counterparts, and has expanded aggressively there ever since Gabriel Rozman initiated the company’s expansion six years ago.

We sat down with Henry Manzano, CEO of TCS Latin America, to find out more about his growth strategy and what TCS sees in the region that its competitors do not.

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Jorge E. Sequeira Picado is one of those entrepreneurs who knows all about running a lean startup – he co-founded SPS Software in 1986 (which later became Exactus Corp.) in a garage in San Jose. The firm later grew to employ over 200 people in four regional offices around Latin America, supplying ERP software to  enterprises.

Now Picado has an entirely different challenge ahead of him – he is taking the reins of Procomer, the already matured trade-promotion agency that is focused on accelerating the flow of exports out of Costa Rica through an assortment of trade channels –from BPO to pineapples.

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SOURCE: EconomicTimes
 Monty Hamilton, chief executive officer of Atlanta-based Rural Outsourcing Inc, is a darling of the American media these days. His company is setting up units in smaller towns in the US, hiring low-cost labour (from those laid off during the recession) and vying for contracts or outsourcing jobs from bigger companies, much the same way call centres and BPOs in Bangalore and Gurgaon have been doing all these years.
Hamilton calls his model “the future of outsourcing in America” and argues that currency exchange rate fluctuations and other factors such as inflation (as in India) make outsourcing business to companies in India risky, as he advises American firms to vote in favour of onshoring instead of offshoring.

Onshoring or domestic outsourcing—some even call it rural outsourcing—is the new buzzword in US business circles. Already, companies such as Microsoft, Mattel and RJ Reynolds have started giving business to onshoring firms, …

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By Tarun George

When debating the merits of various Nearshore outsourcing locations, the topic of currency fluctuation usually takes a backseat to the discussion of wages, talent availability and tax and investment incentives. But what happens when a major outsourcing player’s currency appreciates over a short period of time? That’s the case for Brazil’s real, whose value spiked in early 2009 and steadily increased throughout the year. While now normalizing to its pre-crisis levels, a number of US companies outsourcing in Brazil report that the high rate is making a dent in their balance sheets. The result is that Nearshoring operations in Brazil are more expensive than they were even a year ago. We take a look here at whether companies are feeling that pricing pressure, and how Brasscom is responding.

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Does CPM Braxis really have the horsepower to jump into the ranks of TCS, Wipro, Genpact, Infosys, Accenture, HP and Dell and other world-beating heavyweights? Find out what the company’s co-founder, David Shpilberg has to say about it. ROLL THE VIDEO

By Kirk Laughlin

What really gets CIOs and sourcing decision makers excited about Brazil? The two issues that come up repeatedly among those doing business there or who are inclined to have services delivered from Brazil are – capacity and capability. Scale counts for a lot and Brazil is increasingly built to respond to the tall orders of CIOs whose India-based experiences will continue to be used as points of comparison when they go shopping in Brazil.

One of the many notable rising stars out of Brazil that is trying very hard to live up to this CIO-driven reality is CPM Braxis, formed in 2007 when separate operating companies CPM and Braxis merged.

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SOURCE: Economic Times

TCS, which is owned by India’s biggest industrial conglomerate, provides IT, consultancy and outsourcing services in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru.

“We have a very aggressive growth project in Latin America for the next five years, we want to more than double our sales to over $1 billion,” Alejandro Valenzuela, manager for Peru, Chile and Ecuador, told Reuters in an interview.

“Latin America is really relevant to TCS because it has one of the fastest rates of economic growth,” Valenzuela said. The region will grow up to 5 percent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The economies of Brazil, the regional giant and member of the BRIC group of big emerging markets alongside Russia, India and China, and Peru will expand by about 7 percent this year, according to the IMF. Valenzuela said the financial sector is central to the company’s Latin …

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