Indian BPO firm EXL Service acquires Inductis

Sufia Tippu
Thursday, 06 July 2006 21:33

IT Industry - Market

ExlService Holdings, Inc., one of the top five BPO firms in India, has announced the acquisition of Inductis, a leading strategy and analytics company serving the financial services and insurance industries.

As a result of the acquisition, Inductis will become a wholly-owned and independently branded subsidiary of EXL, focusing on consulting, research and analytics.

EXL provides a wide range of BPO solutions to leading financial institutions in the US where there is an increasing need being felt for analytics and profiling of customers.

EXL’s existing research and analytics business will be combined with Inductis to create a new entity which would provide a full spectrum of knowledge services to EXL’s clients.

Inductis is one of the largest and most successful analytics players with a global delivery model in the marketplace today with 250 employees based in offices in Gurgaon, New York, New Jersey, and Singapore. In 2005, Inductis achieved revenues of approximately $20 million.

Says EXL’s CEO Vikram Talwar: “the days of BPOs focusing only on cost reduction are over. With this acquisition, we plan to assist our clients by leveraging our offshore research and analytics expertise and give results that would impact their bottom line.”

By teaming up, pure play market analytics companies will be able to create solutions and delivering them in such a way that they would be able to effectively compete with much larger companies in delivering value to their clients. “As for Inductis, we will now have the platform to grow faster and further invest in training and development of our people, client relationships, and intellectual property,” says Sandeep Tyagi, managing principal and founder of Inductis.

Market analytics gaining ground

Today customers ask for complex strategic solutions to effectively serve our clients’ needs as they think about BPO more strategically and all types of companies right from GE and Citibank to small firms in varied verticals are leveraging market analytics to provide high-impact, high-value solutions.

Market analytics focuses on how to target new customers, increase customer loyalty, and cross-sell and up-sell new offerings to their existing customers. An extension of data warehousing- the storing of information from operational and customer interaction systems market analytics has an added component of business intelligence which helps companies earn profits by providing insights culled from relevant data. Analysis of sales and profiles of buyers are studied and they throw up never-imagined correlations

Gartner has predicted that business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) will touch $26.4 billion by 2007, growing at a CAGR of 8.9%.

Indian firms get a stronger foothold

In India apart from Inductis, niche players like Marketics, Fractal Analytics as well as pure play BPO firms like Evalueserve, Symphony Services and B2K Corporation are into market analytics in a big way.

Says Vivek Kulkarni, CEO, Brickwork, which is into analytics for financial clients. “Market analytics is becoming more and more crucial to our customers. It is not what these companies offer to consumers that differentiates them, but how they are marketed that significantly impacts their bottomline.”

In FMCG and retail space too, market analytics is getting bigger. “Getting insights into buying patterns of shoppers and giving retailers real time information on which products to carry, how to price them for optimal sales and more important, how to place them on shelves is where this research is critical,” explains S Ramakrishnan, CEO, Marketics, which does market analytics for leading US retail clients.

Symphony Services, another leading software services firm which has a dedicated analytics wing, uses market analytics for its telecom customers.

Ajay Kela, COO and MD, Symphony Services, says: “we use high-end analytics to figure out why telecom subscribers are most likely to cancel their services. Using this data, telecom firms can then target those customers specifically, thereby reducing customer churn, cancellation rates and most important increase loyalty levels and retain them.”