Did you know that Genpact, GE’s erstwhile captive “BPO”, also has a technology service line? That it has been offering IT services since 1999 and it has about 5,000 people with expertise ranging across the food chain from ERP solutions deployment and infrastructure services to IT helpdesk support across the U.S., India, China, Spain, the Netherlands, and Romania is one of the company’s best-kept secrets.
But, now the company is coming out of the closet by more visibly pushing its BPO + IT combo offerings. It is certainly not the first one to do so — in an effort to bring in more business from existing clients, IT companies have been offering combo deals for a while. IBM, Accenture, Infosys, Wipro, all have BPO practices to complement their IT offerings. Genpact is possibly a reverse example where a company better known for BPO is pushing its IT offerings.
But, the company seems serious about its proposition. “Combining IT and BPO is not a good thing to do,” says Tajinder Vohra, SVP and Business Leader for Genpact’s IT services business. “It is the best thing to do.”
Application development is one area of IT that the company almost exclusively offers as a part of a combo deal; while Oracle implementation, managed services and helpdesk are also standalone services. “I will never go out and sell ADM [application development and maintenance],” says Vohra. “If we do F&A, and if that requires ADM then we’ll take up the applications piece.”
Because of its GE legacy (Genpact started off a GE captive), a large part of the company’s IT revenue comes from the global major. Genpact did not reveal the percentage of IT revenue from GE when we spoke to them; nor did it disclose the ratio split between its IT and BPO revenues, though it can be speculated that it will be around 30:70 in favor of BPO. Genpact is also GE’s second biggest IT services provider after Wipro.
The company also recently acquired an SAP provider in the Netherlands, giving it wider access to Europe, a market that global IT and BPO service providers are eagerly tapping into. EXL Service on the BPO front and, Cognizant and Patni on the IT front are just a few companies that announced forays into Europe in July.
