Keane to enter BPO, invest $25 million in India

CIRCUIT EC / New Delhi

KEANE, a leading business and IT outsourcing company, has announced expansion plans for India in the area of IT services. The company also plans to enter the BPO market through an investment in Worldzen (now Keane Worldzen), which provides BPO delivery in India. Keane is planning an investment of $25 million to fund the expansion of its resource base, infrastructure and facilities. The company has also expressed an interest in making acquisitions in India.

Says Brian Keane, president and chief executive officer of Keane, “We are seeing an increased demand for solutions that leverage application outsourcing, BPO and offshore delivery to achieve significant cost reduction and business improvement.” He says the company’s focus for 2004 will be on growing the business; the advanced development centres (ADCs) play a critical role in this as they offer the benefits of offshore delivery for part of their application portfolio.

Last year in October, with the acquisition of a majority interest in Worldzen, Keane expanded its client service delivery into BPO. The company has integrated its process optimisation firm, Keane Consulting Group, into Keane Worldzen’s operations. With this the BPO outfit is now able to handle process optimisation, technology improvement and organisational change management.

On the IT services front, Keane India is expanding its existing ADCs in line with its growth plans. By the end of the current year, Keane India and Keane Worldzen plan to expand their employee strength to over 2,500, taking it up to 5,000 over the next two years; only last year the company had increased its employee strength from 500 to 1,300. Its ADCs are located in Gurgaon, Noida and Hyderabad.

Earlier this year Keane acquired IT and consulting services company Nims Associates to strengthen its expertise in the financial services and insurance markets. The acquisition also helped Keane extend its presence in the midwest US market.

Keane’s transatlantic business alliance with The Unilog Group (a European IT consultancy with operations in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain and Switzerland) is already paying rich dividends in the emerging European IT market. Says Parmindar Miglani, managing director of Keane India, “With a phenomenal growth rate of over 100 percent, Keane India has emerged as one of the fastest-growing IT companies—and it will continue to grow at an even faster pace in the coming months.”