MOVE OVER BUSINESS Process Outsourcing (BPO) outfits. It's now the turn of Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) units to hog the recruitment limelight in the IT-enabled services sector, what with the demand of 50,000 new people every year for the next five years.

"High value-added research, call it KPO or anything else, has a huge potential for growth in India," says Sunil Mehta, Vice-President (Research) at National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM). Currently at just under $1 billion (Rs 4,400 crore), the Indian KPO industry is set to grow 12-fold to $12 billion (Rs 52,800 crore) in the next five years, according to NASSCOM.


But what exactly is a KPO? Well, it's off-shored backend work that can be done relatively cheaply in India, much like the work BPOs do, but it's higher on the value ladder both in terms of employee skills and price realisations. Currently, there are about 300 KPOs in India, providing employment to close to 60,000 people.

A KPO essentially handles back-end work in areas such as credit research, equity research, investment research, patent filing, intellectual property, asset management, and legal and insurance claims processing. And unlike a BPO'S average English-speaking graduates, this work requires specialists such as chartered accountants (CAs), science graduates and post-graduates, MBAs, market researchers, engineers, lawyers and, in some instances, even doctors to man the operations.

Global Exposure, Good Money
For 29-year-old Mamta Mittal, a qualified CA and also an MBA, it was the sheer monotony of research work she was doing at Crislnfac, a Mumbai-based rating agency, that made her turn to Evalueserve, a Gurgaon-based research services KPO. Now as a team leader with Evalueserve, her work not only involves standardising the financial statements of various companies so that they adhere to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), but also handling a team of 40 people, all of whom either have a CA qualification or an MBA under their belt. "Here (in Evalueserve), people are hungry as well as aggressive, and that promotes growth," says Mittal. She is now looking forward to becoming a manager and leading a team of over 100 people.

And it isn't just a good salary upwards of Rs 5 lakh per annum even for greenhorns, that makes professionals like Mittal opt for KPOs. "It is a sunrise industry where professionals get to deal with decision makers and strategists worldwide," says Ashish Gupta, Country Head and COO, Evalueserve.

He's right. Global exposure and the prospect of jumping into a growth sector early on is attracting professionals across various disciplines to KPO jobs. Take the case of 24-year-old Susmitha Sundarlal, Head (Legal Practice) at the Chennai centre of New York-based KPO, Office Tiger. After graduating in law with a specialisation in intellectual property, Sundarlal worked as a litigation lawyer, first with the bar president in Chennai and then with the law firm G&wAssociates.

"I moved from the traditional law practice to a KPO job because legal process outsourcing is an expanding area," says Sundarlal, who got the exposure to inter-act with and also learn the intri-cacies of US laws from US attorneys during her induction trip to New York. Today, she makes decisions related to real estate leases and litigation coding for US-based clients. "There is just a final consultation with the client, but my decisions are usually accepted," says Sundarlal.

Staying In Touch
For 30-year-old Suresh Kumar, who has a masters degree in chemistry and an MBA, it was again not just the monotony of his job as a chemist with Orchid Chemicals that made him opt for Scope eKnowledge (SEK), a Chennai-based KPO into scientific, technical and medical services. "I wanted to learn new things, see history being made instead of just studying the past," says Kumar. Today as an Assistant Manager with SEK, Kumar handles a team of 45 people working on cutting edge research in chemical taxonomy.

"First, there was information technology and now there is engineering technology," explains Ketan Bakshi, Founder & MD of Neilsoft, a Pune-based engineering service KPO. Bakshi sees engineers who had left their disciplines to join the IT bandwagon coming back to their domains for doing interesting work through KPOs.
Thirty-five-year-old Ashish Mistry, an instrumentation engineer who worked with Godrej Soaps, Dalai Projects and Mott MacDonald before moving to Neilsoft, is one such. "The job here provides me with global exposure," says Mistry. At Neilsoft, Mistry's work includes designing end-to-end solutions-from conceptualising to structural analysis to detailed drawings-for companies in Europe and the US in industries as varied as steel fabrication and construction.

With KPOs' annual revenue per employee ranging from $20,000 (Rs 8,80,000) to $120,000 (Rs 52,80,000) per annum, almost five-times that of an average BPO, employers have already upped their ante on retention and recruitment strategies. One example: there are no odd hours for KPO employees. Then, there is the prospect of learning from the best in the field and overseas induction trips to boot. "In time, more work involving decisionmaking will be outsourced to India," says Joseph Siegelman, co-CEO of Office Tiger. An employees market, did you say?

Rs. 4,400 crore today to Rs. 52,800 crore in five years.