Reetika Joshi joins HfS Research as Principal Analyst, BPO and Analytics Strategies (click for bio)
Did you hear the one about the bubbly young Indian woman from Pune who started working with a bunch of cranky old American and British analysts? Well… after a year of contributing to our research, we’re delighted to announce that Reetika Joshi has joined our full-time team to crank up our – already cranky – BPO and analytics coverage.
Reetika’s been a delight to work with as she’s contributed to our research reports on analytics, insurance, banking – and more recently marketing analytics, retail BPO and the European BPO market. Having her on our team fulltime as we expand our operations in India is a great advancement for HfS, and having her “on the ground” perspective where most of these services are delivered is proving invaluable to our coverage. Anyway, over to you Reetika, for a few words on why you made such a curious career move…
Working with HfS Research as a contributing analyst over the past year has been a great experience for me, prompting my decision to join full-time. HfS brings a practical, powerful and unique voice and approach to the sourcing industry. I have found the research themes to be very relevant and to-the-point; a zeitgeist of the real ‘burning’ issues and opportunities facing the industry today. I’ve always enjoyed being an analyst in this field, and there’s never been a better time – the next few years look to be transformational. I look forward to contributing with an ‘HfS’ perspective on things.
What’s great is, being one of the first team members based in India, I’m excited about covering the next phase of growth for India as an outsourcing hub. The lines are surely blurring for ‘India-based providers’ versus the multinationals. Major providers, whether they are headquartered in India, the US or Europe, have realized the inherent benefits of multiple delivery locations spread across offshore, nearshore and onshore locations. Accordingly, we’re seeing some of those investments over the last few years bear fruit, with increasingly globally dispersed workforces – for ‘India-based providers’, and otherwise. There’s now talk of outsourcing to India slowing down, with the Euro-zone debt crisis and US credit downgrading tightening the major markets. But instead, we’re hearing that the hiring targets for India are on track, and the pipelines are still strong. We’ll leave it to the results of the HfS survey to find out the actual degree of impact, but I think there’s a lot more going on that will dictate growth for these providers. There’s a host of targeted, verticalized solutions (across all major verticals), technologies (cloud, to say the least) and newer markets (APAC, SMEs, mid-market) that will make the difference…and this is where my confidence with HfS comes from. The research agenda packs in just these topics to explore in the next year.
Apart from the third party players, the captive market is also continuing to expand in the country (despite being written off by many). In addition to new setups, several existing captives are in the midst of knocking out new services (allied service areas, high value services such as analytics, etc.) for their parent firms. And they’re not viewing themselves as hidden-away backoffices either. A recent conversation with the strategy team of the captive arm of a global insurance giant sealed the deal for me. When every team member is able to share the collective vision, mission and goals of the parent company, in terms of new markets, products, positioning, etc. and the innovative services and processes needed in the future to get there (and how they can/will contribute as an Indian captive) – that’s when I get the feeling that things are certainly on the right track, and concepts like ‘global delivery’ aren’t just nice to have phrases in the industry vocabulary.
Through HfS, I’ve had the opportunity to have many such interactions, with a wide range of outsourcing buyers, providers (the mammoths and the start-ups), and allied influencers, and I believe this is the driving force of things to come for them. The powerful community that they’ve built up over the last four years is a great source of strength. Dialogue between the buyer and provider community is definitely the need of the hour, and in my view HfS is a pioneer in this field, through initiatives such as HfS 25, power-packed webcasts, and definitely not the least, the debates on this blog! I am very excited to come on board a company that is revolutionizing the way sourcing research is created, distributed and debated, through collaboration and innovation, and I look forward to interacting with you all.
Posted in : Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), horses-for-sources-company-news
Great to see HFS expanding globally and with such strong focus on BPO!
Peter
Congratulations Reetika! HFS is the best website to get great insight on outsourcing. Having a voice from India will add some great perspective,
Rahul
Its been great interacting with you Reetika and congratulations on the movement. Wish you best and look forward to more interesting researches from your desk.
Thanks a lot for your messages, everyone! I look forward to covering some interesting new research themes, and count on your great insights to drive the discussion onwards and upwards. Cheers.