"IT and BPO are equally important for us"

"IT and BPO are equally important for us"

Mukul Agrawal, managing director, Unisys Global Services-India

Which are the areas of your BPO operation?

We have finance back office and HR back office, which have already started.
Then we have technical helpdesk call center. though it is a technical activity,
it gets classified as BPO because it is servicing business users. This is a big
area for us and about 50% of our people work on these.

Mukul Agrawal, managing director, Unisys Global Services-India

Are you engaged in some captive operation? And also, Unisys
announced $180 mn investment in India. What portion of this investment is
targeted at BPO?

Some of the work that we do in finance and HR are captive but majority is
third party. This amount ($180 mn) is committed over a 5-year period. Lot of it
has already been invested. For us, IT and BPO are equally important.

Which are the top verticals for you? Do you also service the
domestic market?

The financial sector is very big for us. Almost all the large banks are our
clients. We have a small domestic BPO outfit based out of Mumbai.

Do you think it would be good for the government to allow
sharing of infrastructure to offer both international and domestic BPO services
from the same premises?

The government should allow this. I have leased line from here to global
network. Unfortunately my Mumbai office as it is comparatively smaller, can't
afford another leased line to the US office. If we had this facility, we would
just link them here. So we would definitely like to share the infrastructure for
our export operations. But for us, as most of our domestic clients are based in
Mumbai, it makes more sense to run our domestic BPO business from there.

What is Unisys' strategy for data security?

To ensure a full proof security, we take care of aspects related to people,
process, and technology. We are very strict about people's background
verification. If there is any discrepancy, immediate action is taken. We have a
very well defined code of ethics. For every person in the organization, there is
an online training, which includes issues like handling different situations
regarding confidentiality and privacy. It is updated every 12 months.

Within 60 days of joining, the employees have to get
certified and subsequently certification is also necessary every calendar. This
acts as a constant reminder about the importance that we place on ethics. It
actually walks you through the whole thing. Ethics influences behavior. From the
process perspective, we have segregation of people and also according to the
floors. For example, those handling consumer data are kept separate from other
parts of the business.

What are the technologies that you have implemented for
security data?

We have deployed lots of security devices and technologies to ensure
security. Even for cheque processing, we do masking — the names of the
customers are masked. This ensures that people don't fiddle with it. We also
have a paperless office and everything is based on images. All the CD drives in
the PC are locked. We don't allow people to take paper out, and physical
checking is in place.

Sudesh Prasad