BPO - Lanka has potential to cater to high end niche market
 

by Gamini Warushamana

In Business Process Out-sourcing (BPO) Sri Lanka has the potential to cater to the high end niche market which requires more educated personnel said Mangala Karunaratne, CEO of Calcey Technologies (CT), a successful Sri Lankan technology company providing its services to leading US companies.

This business is highly profitable and we can provide these services at a cost much lower compared to US and Europe. This is the segment Sri Lanka should follow and not the typical BPO or call centres where India has pioneered, Karunaratne said.

Calcey Technologies provides scientific research, software development, information and data processing and creative design services to large US companies in financial services, healthcare, biotechnology, advertising, retail, manufacturing, technology, entertainment as well as government agencies and NGOs. Taleo, Biocompare, Ambeo, Medcompare, Dentalcompare and Intracel are some of these companies.

There is market potential in accounting, financial services, engineering, legal and many other professional fields, he said. Karunaratne said that his company is proud of the success they have achieved within a short period of time in this lucrative business. Calcey Technologies started its operation in 2002.

He said that the annual growth of the company in terms of revenue is over 100%. CT is proud of its highly qualified professionals who are engaged in extremely complex scientific research projects.

"We needed Phd or masters level qualified professionals for this scientific research project of Biocompare Inc. We advertised but did not have much hope.

However, we received 12 applications, Karunaratne said.

There are qualified professionals in the country but fluency in English is the problem in this kind of work. CT is now ready to train people under its experienced staff to overcome this problem.

Biocompare Inc is a California based global media company for the life science industry. The company tried offshore partners in India for two years and was not happy with the quality of the services. CT recently took over the project and a recent communique of the Co-founder of the company and the chief operating officer Matthew MCLean said "... a complex task like scientific research, web application to web design to simple data scraping, the service is timely and the quality of work top notch. When working with India we had so much of QA and redo. It became more troublesome than it was worth.

With Calcey we have not had any issue and they do the job like we envisioned." Now CT carries out similar research projects for Medicompare, Dentalcompare and subsidiaries of the Biocompare Inc. Taleo Corporation, a world leader in providing talent management solutions is using CT's software developed to share knowledge based solutions across the globe among consultants, sales and engineering team.

According to Karunaratne, the business is purely running on personal contacts in marketing its service. Karunaratne, a graduate from the California University in computer science who worked as a software engineer in several IT companies in the Silicon Valley, gets most of its projects on his personal contacts.

This is common to most of the small companies in the business like us, he said.