Offshore companies eyeing Canada for expansion
With the volume of jobs heading for Indian shores, the Indian companies on these shores are heading for other shores as well in the name of globalization. The next popular frontier: Canada.
While Canada has its own fledgling outsourcing market, it also has the major Indian outsourcing companies such as Satyam, Tata Consultancy, Infosys and Wipro, riding on its competitive advantage to be part of its growing global outsourcing market.
"It has really been the last 12 to 18 months when major Indian players have set up more permanent offices in Toronto. . . . We're seeing clients looking at more strategic endeavours with Indian-based firms and pursuing them quite actively,"
says PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Canada’s IT advisory leader.
The Indian companies cut their IT teeth in outsourcing through services supplied to cost-cutting US companies, starting off with basic services such as call centers. With the increase in task complexity – such as for BPO, the Indian companies have responded by delegating work to other countries with existing IT infrastructure such as Singapore, Israel, and Canada.
Due to BPO’s critical nature, US clients seek to have these done closer to home, or “near shore”. Canada provides quite a near fit with its stability, geographical proximity, and cultural similarities.
Companies with Indian roots stand to gain from this phenomenon since it operates on a seamless global delivery model tailored to customers’ risk preferences. Such a global outsourcing model can have work distributed between Canadian and Indian operations – the design and project management in Canada, and second-tier jobs in India.
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