Botswana pitches for BPO business
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(InfoWorld) - The South African nation of Botswana hopes to gain a share of the BPO (business process outsourcing) market by making a pitch for niche areas. Botswana's challenge is that competitors in Asia and Europe enjoy first-mover advantage, and are large enough to compete on cost, according to Moraki Mokgosana, business development executive of Botswana's International Financial Services Centre, a government agency. "We intend to aim our focus on the targeting of niche markets and achieving our growth through quality of service as opposed to the cost element," Mokgosana said."Our strengths lie mostly in BPO in the financial services sector." Botswana took this approach after it commissioned Accenture to evaluate BPO opportunities. Historically, the economy of Botswana has, since independence, been driven by mining and to a lesser extent by agriculture. The country has been looking to diversify and achieve economic growth. It has identified the tourism and financial markets as alternative engines for economic growth. Within the financial services sector, an opportunity for the development of the BPO and the call center industries were identified. The Accenture report listed Botswana's favorable legal and economic environment, good telecommunications infrastructure, and its small though skilled workforce as potential advantages. Botswana has taken a double-pronged strategy toward building its BPO portfolio by developing local businesses and attracting companies to locate in the country. A showpiece of Botswana's efforts in the BPO sector is the privately owned Oseg Group. Oseg is one of the largest outsourcers in the country, focusing on services like accounts receivable. It also does telemarketing. The country has rolled out copious incentives such as a guaranteed level of corporate tax until 2020 and exemptions from withholding taxes on interest, commercial royalties, consulting fees and dividends paid to nonresidents. "Botswana can employ a phased approach starting with some 'low hanging fruit' in the short term and culminating in more complex offerings in the longer term," Mokgosana said.
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A major comparative study to investigate the conduct of foreign and domestic policy towards the Zimbabwean crisis in four Southern African countries including Botswana is underway.
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The Karnataka state government is trying to slow growth in Bangalore by encouraging new investors to set up their facilities in new townships.The concept of satellite towns is not new to Bangalore. While companies moved to these satellite towns because of the relatively cheap real estate, they did not provide housing there. As a result, employees had to commute from their homes in Bangalore to townships like Electronic City.Karnataka will now insist that companies establishing facilities in the new townships should also provide housing for their employees, said M.N. Vidyashankar, secretary for information technology in the state government. The township at Bidadi will be self-contained with schools, malls, and a direct link to an international airport under construction, he added.Besides the new townships, the government is also trying to reduce migration from the hinterland into Bangalore by trying to route new investments in IT, call centers, and business process outsourcing (BPO) facilities to other towns in Karnataka like Belgaum, Hubli, Bellary, and Mysore. The government has acquired land in some of these towns to be developed in partnership with the private sector.To get access to new staff pools, as well as to cut costs, Indian outsourcers are looking at smaller towns where they can set up their new facilities, said Siddharth Pai, a partner at outsourcing consultancy firm Technology Partners International Inc. (TPI) in Houston. Some outsourcing companies like Infosys already have operations in towns around Bangalore, like Mysore and Mangalore.Some of these small towns are centers for education, and hence good places to hire staff, Pai said. The only drawback so far has been poor connectivity by road and air, which the government should try to solve, he addedWith a population of over 6.5 million, the Indian city of Bangalore is reeling from too much growth at too fast a pace. The city houses the services delivery centers of top Indian outsourcers like Infosys Technologies and Wipro, and multinational companies like IBM, Dell, and Oracle.The traffic jams, high cost of housing, and shortage of staff in the city has not, however, slowed down new entrants to the city. In August, the state of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital, cleared 52 new investments in the area of IT, said Vidyashankar.IT, call center, and BPO facilities in Bangalore employ 480,000 direct staff, apart from providing indirect employment to over 3 million other people, according to Vidyashankar. These sectors contribute to 36 percent of the state&#39;s GDP (gross domestic product), which is expected to increase to 50 percent of GDP by 2011, he added.
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As OracleÂ begins mapping out its plans for integrating PeopleSoft's applications business into its own, PeopleSoft's channel of reseller and integration partners are waiting to see how they'll fit into Oracle's strategy.
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JBoss has added business process management (BPM) to its growing roster of open source software. The company has hired Tom Baeyens, the founder and lead developer of jBpm, an open source workflow engine.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP AG is taking its Business Process Expert (BPX) Community initiative mainstream after several months of more limited operations with the aim of creating an online forum for business analysts and consultants to exchange information and access software from SAP and some third parties. A new category of worker is emerging, the business process expert, according to Mark Yolton, vice president of community programs at SAP. When the applications company officially launches its new BPX community Web site Tuesday, it will be aimed at these workers who act as a bridge between the IT and business sides of their organizations. The individuals combine a strong knowledge of their companies' business needs with some technical know-how, particularly in application development, he added. SAP will be making the announcement of the BPX community on the first day of its TechEd developer conference in Las Vegas this week. The BPX community is designed to complement the vendor's existing SAP Developer Network (SDN), which the company set up less than three years ago and currently serves some 500,000 developers. In surveys of SDN users conducted in June 2005 and January 2006, SAP discovered that around 12 percent of those polled identified themselves as business analysts or consultants. These people told the vendor that SDN didn't fully meet their needs, leading to SAP developing the new community as a way to encourage them to use more of its software and that of selected partners. The idea is that business process experts can share ideas and experiences at the BPX community site via discussion forums, Yolton said. The site also includes blogs and access to both SAP technology and some third-party products, notably Aris Business Architect business process management software from IDS Scheer AG. SAP hopes to have a secure wiki in place within the next six weeks, he added. Business process experts are particularly keen to discuss approaches to business process modeling and how to transform process models into active applications, Yolton said. The business analysts and consultants are also interested in hearing from their peers about change leadership and change management best practices and experiences. SAP has been offering the BPX community as a "sneak peek" to limited numbers of SAP customers since mid-May, Yolton said, and the site has already attracted more than 30,000 users. "Over time, we expect it to grow to a similar size as SDN," he added. During the past few months, users have accessed the site from all over the world, with particular concentrations coming from China, Germany, India, the U.K. and the U.S. Initially, SDN and the new BPX community will look similar, but gradually the sites will become more distinctive. SAP isn't providing details on the financial or employee resources it's drawing on to support the new site. Yolton stressed the BPX community site is "free and open," meaning that anyone can register to use it for free, not just SAP customers. SAP is currently looking at establishing relationships with educators and training providers to beef up the training section of the site, he added. Available only in English,Â SAP's BPX community can be found online. Â
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Gabarone - The son of poor cattle farmers whose good school grades paved the way to Oxford University, President Festus Mogae describes himself as the &#39;CEO&#39; of diamond-rich Botswana, the southern African country he has lead since 1998.
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Botswana is pinning its Hollywood  hopes on a new film based on the best-selling fiction series  &quot;The No. 1 Ladies&#39; Detective Agency.&quot;
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Botswana's capital offers an example of one city's efforts to manage explosive growth.
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SunGard puts business know-how to good use.
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GABORONE, Botswana  - People are fed up with  violence, aggression and drama in books -- they would like to  read stories in which the most exciting thing that happens is  that the main characters drink a cup of tea.
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A Bridgewater company is betting the road to success goes through some of the world's poorest countries.
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Company hopes to lure QuickBooks users to its revamped small business app.
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Tripoli sets outs transparent bidding process for foreign firms to woo investment for sanctions-hit oil sector. By Hassen Zenati - TRIPOLI.
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The business software maker hopes to prod rival Oracle into raising its current bid by $1.5 billion.
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BANGALORE, INDIA - India's software services and business process outsourcing (BPO) industries could face a shortage of skilled workers in the coming years, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) in Delhi.
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Mogae (65), who took over the presidency in 1998 from Ketumile Masire, has campaigned on a platform that calls for continuity, telling voters that the prosperity built in Botswana over nearly four decades was due to his party&#39;s sound policies.