24/7 Customer building momentum for IPO

24/7 Customer, a $70 million business process outsourcing (BPO) services provider, is building up momentum for a public offer. The company, funded by Sequoia Capital and Ram Shriram, is hoping to hit the $100 million topline by end of this fiscal.

S Nagarajan, founder & COO, 24/7Customer said: "We will certainly go public but it is not in the immediate future. Going public is a milestone for us and eventually it will happen."

According to industry analysts, 24/7 Customer will be preparing the ground for this event after the current fiscal. It is expected that it will look at a Nasdaq listing during 2007-08. The company almost doubled its revenues from $39 million during 2004-05 to $70 million in 2005-06.

The company today announced that it has successfully transferred a BPO centre housing 1,600 employees to Aviva under a build-operate-trasfer (BOT) model.

While this transfer takes place, 24/7Customer has built up a parallel team of 700 people for Aviva to handle various processes for Aviva. "This centre is at Chennai and is also under a BOT model, however, with no timeframe fixed as of yet for the transfter. We anticipate growing this centre to 1,600 personnel pretty soon," Nagarajan added, stating the revenue loss from the transfer will be absorbed by this growth.

According to Rajnish Virmani, CEO, Aviva Global Services: "We want to have the best of both worlds. Captives as well as service providers. Ideally we will balance this ratio at 70:30."