UK outsourcing cell eyes local partners

The National Outsourcing Association (NOA) of UK was currently working on building a peer-to-peer (P2P) network between small and medium enterprises (SMEs) between countries, to leverage the untapped business potential in outsourcing.

NOA would come out with a dedicated interactive portal in three month's time with an investment of around $100,000 where SMEs from both UK and other countries could showcase themselves.

The portal would also have social networking aspect to it, or could act as a blog where interested parties could interact, said Mark Kobayashi-Hillary, director, NOA.

Around 99.3 per cent of all companies in the UK were SMEs, and most of them could not afford to engage expensive London based firms for their information and communication technology (ICT) related work, Hillary said.

"These companies would typically look at outsourcing their ICT work, like building and maintaining a website. The requirements were more value-tied, and there was a huge untapped outsourcing market here for the Indian ICT SMEs.", he explained.

British SMEs were already working with firms in Malaysia and Philippines besides collaborations in Russia and China for software development. India, with a vibrant SME population, indicated huge potential in the business process and knowledge process outsourcing space, the NOA felt.

The association could also tie-up with industry chambers like the Confederation of Indian Industry(CII) and was in talks with the IT industry body Nasscom for future collaborations in brand building for SMEs.

Once launched, Nasscom could work with NOA to publicise the platform in India, Hillary informed.

It was important to work on perception, and Indian SMEs currently lacked awareness on the need for brand-building abroad, he added.

Market research firm Gartner has indicated that the global outsourcing market would grow at a rate of 8.1 per cent in 2008.