Increased competitions in the field of services deliverance and development have led the Indian BPO firms to engage the services of fresh management. In fact, the sector that came into existence merely a decade ago is worth $11 billion now, has largely been responsible for changing the perception regarding working outside Indian for international Fortune 500 conglomerates for several thousand youths just out of college, is once again seeking new talents to propel its subsequent growth phase.

While several major business process outsourcers in the country, including WNS Global Services, Infosys BPO and Vertex, recently appointed new corporate chiefs to manage their business, Firstsource Solutions was the latest to join the bandwagon. While Matthew Vallance took over as the managing director and CEO of Firstsource Solutions replacing Ananda Mukherjee, Infosys BPO appointed Swaminathan Dandapani as its new CEO and Keshav Murugesh is the new CEO of WNS Global Services. Acting in the same vein, the country’s largest BPO firm Genpact also relocated N V Tyagarajan from the United States and assigned him greater responsibilities in India.

Quoting the managing partner at EMA Partners International, an executive search company, K Sudarshan, a financial news website reports that the departure of Ananda Mukherjee from Firstsource Solutions is very significant considering the fact that he had nurtured the firm for nine years since its inception and developed it from nothing to a $400 million entity that it is today. On the other hand, Mukherjee says that more and more BPO firms will soon adopt this policy, because the BPO sector was just a start-up industry when he had joined it and now it requires a change of leadership since it has matured and needs new directions for further growth.

Going by the chronology of the BPO industry in India, there was no such industry called business process outsourcing in the country in the late 1990s. Initially, a number of multinationals, such as British Airways, GE, American Express and Swiss Air, had established their individual exclusive offshore facilities in India with a view to undertake all activities, including processing insurance claims and closing accounts books. Close on the heels of this development, local start-up firms, such as EXL, Firstsource Solutions and Daksh set up international deliverance models to serve clients outside India, which actually made the model of third party outsourcing popular among the international clients.

Industry experts point out that during the initial stage of the industry, the most important test was to develop an international delivery form and the previous executives were highly successful in achieving their goals. Nevertheless, with the advent of growth models based on value, the end result is the worth contributed by leaders to their customers. In such a situation, it is often difficult for any individual who are experienced in a specific form of growth approach to change according to the present requirements.

In addition, the BPO industry in India, which comprises more than 100 firms of different size and worth, is confronted with several challenges that did not exist earlier. While the emerging offshoring destinations like the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam in the east are winning most of the fundamental call center contracts, BPO firms in the eastern European nations are competing for the European language as well as intricate business processing contracts. Besides, the rate of growth of the Indian BPO sector has dropped from around 18% to 13%-16% in just a span of 18 months. According to Nasscom, the nodal organization that lays down the policies of the Indian IT and BPO industry, this is the perfect time for a change in leadership, as it has become inevitable.