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Business

The business of business process outsourcing

Can Big Blue succeed in BPO? The latest edition of KnowledgeWharton, published by the University of Penn's Wharton School, reports that IBM continues to shift away from platforms to services, with nearly half of its $89 billion revenue from last year coming from services.
Written by Joe McKendrick, Contributing Writer
Can Big Blue succeed in BPO? The latest edition of KnowledgeWharton, published by the University of Penn's Wharton School, reports that IBM continues to shift away from platforms to services, with nearly half of its $89 billion revenue from last year coming from services. The company got into BPO consulting in a big way with the $3.9 billion acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers in late 2002. Earlier this year IBM purchased Daksh, an Indian BPO provider with 6,000 employees. IBM has scored some good deals, but Wharton researchers warn that yanking a process out of a firm and delivering it back as a service is by no means a commodity business. "IBM will have to find ways of automating the processes and migrating at least some parts of the process execution to off-shore locations to remain competitive in these segments."
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