The Hindu : Kerala News : Shift from traditional IT, says company head

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Saturday, Dec 01, 2007
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Kerala

Shift from traditional IT, says company head

Staff Reporter

Chairman of UST Global for offering high-value services

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Dan Gupta, chairman and chief executive officer of UST Global, an IT services and BPO solutions company with offices at Technopark here, has said that the country as a whole and Kerala in particular must shift from traditional information technology (IT) to high-value services to tap the emerging avenues in the sector globally.

At a press conference here on Wednesday, Mr. Dan Gupta said the avenues and the revenue in the traditional IT sectors, such as business process outsourcing, were getting squeezed because of intense competition.

“We need to be proactive and not reactive. We must be able to forecast the changes that are happening globally and work out our strategies accordingly,” he said.

“The big business groups in the developed countries are willing to pay heavily for strategies designed to augment their customer-care operations and market enhancing applications. We should be able to architect, design, develop, test and maintain such applications. India has demonstrated its competence in these areas, and the focus must be to widen, sharpen and consolidate those competencies.”

He said U.S. insurance companies were willing to provide insurance coverage if their customers were prepared to get open-heart surgeries done in India. The country had better doctors and facilities. The patients would definitely get better care here, and all these at lower costs. Imagine what would be the advantage of the country if one-lakh open-heart surgeries on patients from the U.S. were to be performed in India, he added.

The U.S. legal firms were prepared to rely on Indian expertise for their operations. “We should be able to tap such emerging avenues and not remain satisfied with the BPO operations,” he said.

There must be intense efforts in India for training people in IT and other emerging service sectors. “Sky is the limit in these areas. The companies are on a talent hunt and the constraints are being experienced not on the demand side, but on the supply side.”

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