Genpact ITO rocked by resignations
By Pulkit Sharma

Genpact was India’s first BPO and still continues its market leadership position in India.  Genpact has 41,000 employees and earned revenue of $1.1 Billion in 2009. Genpact started life as a Business Unit of GE, but by January 2005 it became an independent company.  Two years later, it was listed on the NYSE. In 2009, NASSCOM ranked Genpact as the No. 1 BPO company in India.

On July 12, 2010, Techgoss has exclusively reported that Genpact has sacked an Assistant Vice President (AVP) after serious allegations were leveled against him by a junior.  The AVP who was with Genpact for more than 5 years was the subject of a thorough Genpact HR investigation which concluded in the second week of July, 2010.  To Genpact’s credit, they acted swiftly once the complaint reached senior management.

While Genpact is India’s No. 1 BPO, it has had considerable successes in the IT Outsourcing (ITO) sector as well.  A Techgoss Tipster who currently works at Genpact ITO tells us that something is not right at Genpact ITO. In the last three months, it has undergone a number of changes at the top leadership level. While Vice President and Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing Leader, Ramakrishna Chinta, quit the company in June, 2010, he was soon followed by other key players.  ITO Vice President and Human Resources Leader Anand Kabra, Vice President and Manufacturing Vertical Leader Mohd. Haque and Vice President and Enterprise Applications Leader Suhrid Brahma have also put down their papers and are serving their notice periods.

It may be noted here that out of the four, two – Suhrid Brahma and Mohd Haque - are Band 1 which is the top most level at Genapct. And Mohd. Haque and Anand Kabra have also been past recipients of Platinum Awards which are the highest level of recognition at Genpact. So, now the question arises why did they quit?  Among the many services and solutions Genpact provides to its clients, in 2009, BPM services accounted for approximately 84% of total revenues up from 80% in 2008, while revenues from IT services were merely 16%.

In 2008, approximately 80% of Genpact’s revenues came from business process services, up from 76% in 2007, while revenues from IT services were 20%. While the top leadership namely Pramod Bhasin and Tiger Tyagarajan attributed the decrease in IT revenues to "industry softness in discretionary spending in areas such as software services", many insiders feel that the management lacked the vision to grow the IT business and have applied the ‘same size fits all’ strategy to all their businesses, much to the dismay of the IT leadership.    It may be noted here that leaders like Anand Kabra (10 years with Genpact), Mohd. Haque (almost 9 years with Genpact) and Suhrid Brahma (almost 9 years and in between he was in Oracle for a year) have been with the organization for the long haul.

In 2007, Genpact ITO contributed 24 per cent of the revenue. This fell to 20 percent in 2008 and 16 percent in 2009.