Moving Up The Value-Chain In Broad-Based Outsourcing Services
Alok Aggarwal
Chairman of Evalueserve
Abstract
Global offshoring is already beginning to occur with $12.5 billion worth of low-end IT offshoring expected to take place in 2003 alone and another $4.5 billion in other low-end busines process operations. Given that many low-wage countries like India, China, Russia, Hungary, and Poland graduate large numbers of people with engineering, business, accounting, legal, and medical degrees, it is not surprising that offshoring of high-end services is now beginning to emerge as a strong movement. In this talk, we discuss this movement and how this will alter business models in some service industries. We discuss case studies in equity research, patent writing and filing, research and development, network management, analytics and datamining, medical tourism and operations research and decision support systems. We discuss strategies taken by low-wage countries to maintain and grow the supply of high-end professionals. Finally, we discuss the expected impact of this movement on the US economy based on historical precedents.
Bio
Alok Aggarwal is the Founder and Chairman of Evalueserve -- a company that provides various high-value added IT enabled services to North America and Europe from its offices in India. Prior to starting Evalueserve, Dr. Aggarwal was the Director of Emerging Business Opportunities for IBM Research Division Worldwide. In this capacity, his responsibilities included converting business innovations into business models and then take them to market to form profitable business.
In July 1997, Dr. Aggarwal "founded" the IBM India Research Laboratory that he set up inside the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. Dr. Alagh, the Indian Minister for Human Resources and Mr. Richard Celeste, the US Ambassador to India inaugurated this Laboratory. Dr. Aggarwal started this Laboratory from "ground zero" and had built it into a 60-member team (with 30 PhDs and 30 Masters in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and in Business Administration) by October 2000. This Laboratory works with other IBM R&D Centers and Business Units worldwide to provide research services and products in e-commerce, supply chain management, speech recognition, wired and wireless networking software, media mining, and systems management. During 1999-2000, Dr. Aggarwal served as a member of Executive Committee on Information Technology of the Confederation of the Indian Industry (CII) and also of the Telecom Committee of Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). He is currently a Chartered Member of The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE) organization.
Dr. Aggarwal received his B. Tech. from IIT Delhi in 1980 in Electrical Engineering and his Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins University in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1984.
Dr. Aggarwal joined IBM Research Division in Yorktown Heights New York in 1984 and has published 55 Research papers (in renowned journals) and has filed 10 patent applications. Along with other IBMers, he created and sold a "Supply Chain Management Solution" for paper mills, steel mills and related industries. During this period, he was also on the editorial board of several research journals in Computer Science. During the fall of 1987 and 1989, he was on sabbatical from IBM and he taught two courses (in these two terms) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and supervised two Ph.D. students during this period. He has served as program chairperson for a number of conferences, including Symposium on Theory of Computing, Foundations of Computer Science, and Symposium on Computational Geometry. He has also served as a Chairperson of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing and on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal of Computing, Algorithmica, and Journal of Symbolic Computation. During July 1996 and July 1997, he worked with the Vice President of Strategy and developed Strategy and Plans for IBM Research Division worldwide.