Analytics Outsourcing has been existing in India for a while now. A lot of biggies like American Express, GE Capital, HSBC have already outsourced portions of their analytics work to India by setting up what we call dedicated ‘Analytics Outsourcing’ centers. Of late, there has been a surge of third party vendors who have opened up shops to provide analytics outsourcing services to clients. Inductis has been a pioneer in establishing Analytics Outsourcing practice as a third party provider.
The reason for these third parties mushrooming is not difficult to understand: Clients want to focus on their core competencies; they do not want to spend their energies in trying to hire the difficult-to-find analytics resources, and then in trying to train and retain them while supporting individual career development. At the same time, they need to have a competitive advantage through deployment of advanced analytics for better understanding their customers and environment.
The solution to the clients is obvious. Outsource the analytics requirements to third party dedicated players. Let the vendors deploy their analytics resources in a dedicated manner for us, and let the ‘augmented’ teams work as extended arms of internal teams; Let the vendors worry about hiring, training, ramping up and retaining these resources as well as about adding ‘flexible’ resources as per the requirement - and all this with a cost differential of 20%+!
Analytics Outsourcing is thus fast catching up. Currently, these third party shops are sub 100 employees in size. However, with the rapid growth envisaged, it is likely that a lot of these small shops will gain prominence in terms of size over next 2-3 years.
What do these extended, outsourced analytics teams do? Analytics as such is a loosely defined word by different vendors and is used to represent a multitude of services.
At Inductis, we define analytics very clearly as helping businesses make better operating decisions by analyzing large amounts of data using sophisticated analysis tools. This includes building risk / marketing scorecards, validating existing score cards, building Basel II Compliance scorecards, providing support in reporting and dashboards, supporting campaign management, segmenting prospects / customers, and data management / data cleanup / data processing for prospects databases and collections files.
As can be seen from above, Analytics Outsourcing is here to stay. It is probably at a stage where BPO industry was 4-5 years ago, and is thus bound to see significant growth in the near future.
