BPO industry still needs nurturing

Say BPO and usually the first set of images that flash through the mind are Gen-X youngsters working in swanky hi-tech offices, with lavish canteens and a fleet of air-conditioned cabs ferrying them around town and the outskirts at odd hours. It is easy to think BPO-owners are quite like King Midas of our times. After all, if they can offer all those facilities and pay packets to entry-level employees, it’s not hard to imagine them making big profits. Right? Wrong. Contrary to general perceptions, the BPO industry is at an inflection point from where it is about to tip down. A large number of entrepreneurs have closed shop because of huge operational losses.

It happens with almost every industry that in a nascent stage, a large number of players jump onto the bandwagon. As the industry matures, some of them survive while the rest eventually die out in the cut-throat competition. That has happened to the BPO industry in India as well.

Added to this is a long list of woes: over- dependence on North American and European mid-rung markets, crippling effects of the sub-prime mortgage crises, rupee volatility, rising inflation, soaring fuel prices, intra-industry attrition, looming taxes, global warming and an ill-informed and non-sensitised government machinery.

What rub salt into the wound is that outsourcing has not been allowed to mature into an industry. It has always been viewed as a part of IT and termed as “ITeS”—an acronym for IT-e nabled Services. This ITeS is a funny term, as in the 21st century there is hardly any business that is not ITeS. Even households are ITeS today with everyone extensively using phones, computers, laptops, the Internet, broadband and so on, both for work and play. It is beyond explanation why BPOs have been given this exclusive (dis)privilege of being called as ITeS?

By terming BPOs as ITeS, a false perception is formed, levelling the BPO industry maturity index to that of the IT industry. It is like comparing a three-year-old Labrador to a three-month-old Pug. According to a Nasscom-McKinsey report, the annual revenue projection for the Indian IT industry is $87 billion. On the other hand, the current size of the BPO industry is $11 billion, by a Nasscom-Everest India study. The IT industry has taken almost two decades to reach this level. The BPO sector is less than half a decade old and it is being clubbed with a fully developed IT industry, although it has been largely left to survive on its own. Although IT is now strong enough to do so, the BPO industry would be hit really hard by this approach. The BPO Industry rightfully deserves at least 10 more years of fiscal support and benefits… similar to those that were given to the likes of garment and software (IT) exporters for scores of years and are now being denied to the BP industry by clubbing it with the IT industry.

BPO is the only industry that can employ people without fussing too much over conventional yardsticks like education, economic class, location or age. In any other industry, one needs a certain level of education to be “employable”. And not everyone in our country has the luxury of good education, but this should not be a hindrance for a person to earn a livelihood. Of course, there are jobs that do not require a degree per se , but then they require huge investments and infrastructure to employ the otherwise “unemployable”.

Now every village cannot have a manufacturing plant or an IT company, but every village can surely have a BPO. At the very least, all that is required is a few phone connections and/or computers for a rural BPO to be in place. People can carry out voice, typing, accounting and transcription services. They can work on telemarketing in their local dialect, tapping suburban and urban markets; disseminate information on agricultural commodity and fertiliser pricing; send weather alerts; offer agritech, debt and lifestyle counseling and do a lot more than was once done by Krishi Darshan on Doordarshan.

In fact, already tier-II and tier-III cities are becoming hot destinations for BPOs and very soon village or rural BPOs would be a common thing. States like Bihar and Rajasthan have already set up village BPOs. But if they don’t get the kind of support they require, these small entrepreneurs who are investing all their savings and capital in this “emerging business” would be forced to leave the industry like so many others.

This is neither premonition nor pessimism, simply compare the HR/Job supplements of mainline newspapers of today and the corresponding period for last year. You get the picture. Keeping these facts in mind, how can BPOs be expected to create two million jobs by 2012? The sector sure has the potential to do so, but if it is left to sustain on its own, the full potential can never be realised.

The projections for the BPO sector are huge: almost five-fold increase in size from $11 billion to $50 billion by 2012 and a 50 % growth rate over the next five years as compared to 35% in the past five years. Two million jobs across the country in four years--the BPO sector sure has enormous untapped potential but mere potential does not amount to performance. The message is clear and simple. This sector needs strong government support in order to grow independently from a budding sector into a mature industry. If not, it may remain a just a sub-sector of IT. In the worst case scenario, it may even become a Harvard Business School case study of a sector that once had immense potential but could never realise it due to the lack of political and bureaucratic will in India to understand its nuances.

Now, BPOs queue up to book seat in billion dollar club

BANGALORE: The game is fast changing for the Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) industry as for several players, entry into the billion-dollar club may be round the corner.

Given the inorganic opportunities, maturity of outsourcing and an appetite to grow scale rapidly, many BPO players may breach the psychological barrier much faster than IT services companies.

Large players manage to create a big impact on clients and employees and are serious contenders for mega deals, says Tholons CEO Avinash Vashistha.

As of now, leading the race to get into the billion-dollar league is Genpact, which reported a revenue of $823 million for 2007 with an year-on-year (YoY) growth of 34%. Others in the fray are WNS and Aditya Birla Minacs, who are distinctly behind Genpact but have ambitious plans

WNS, with a revenue of $460 million, has been scouting for inorganic options to fuel growth. Aditya Birla is already looking at a $1-billion revenue in the next three years from its current level of $392 million.

Analysts feel that IT services success story is now unfolding in the BPO industry. Once a couple of Indian IT services companies such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro got into the billion dollar league, they were catapulted into the big stage. It is very commonplace now for the India IT services biggies competing directly against the global giants like IBM, Accenture, HP, in fact, even winning a few deals.

Large Indian IT services players, which roughly took about two decades to cross the $1-billion mark, operated in a different era when they mostly grew organically. Their inorganic growth path came much later unlike the case of the BPO companies, which may have crunched the time to grow big.

Says Ernst & Young partner (business advisory services) Milan Sheth, “The BPO journey in India has been from the early part of this decade coinciding with globalisation.” But all is not rosy for the BPO industry, whose fortunes are linked to an environment where there is serious competition coming from 15 other destinations.

On the other hand, India as a destination enjoyed a virtual dominance in offshoring, Sheth says. Aditya Birla Minacs MD Dev Bhattacharya says achieving this target would give them the status of a world class company and also be a big influence in bagging large deals.

According to a Nasscom-Everest study, the Indian BPO industry was staring at a total export market opportunity of $220-280 billion by 2012 while the domestic segment would provide an additional $15-20 billion.

The study further says that in just over a decade, the industry has grown to reach nearly $11 billion in export revenue employing over 7 lakh. And the next five years could potentially see a five-fold growth.

Integreon named top global KPO provider

MUMBAI: Integreon Managed Solutions, a Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) firm, today said it has been named the top-ranked global KPO provider by the 2008 Black Book of Outsourcing, the Brown-Wilson Group's prestigious annual survey of the global outsourcing industry.

This is the third consecutive year the company has received the award, a release said here. The company was ranked third among the Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) providers overall and led all vendors in the sub-category of Litigation Document Review.

It was ranked strongly among Document Process Outsourcing (DPO) providers overall, taking the lead-ranking for financial, regulatory, insurance, legal and compliance document services.

Integreon, for the second consecutive year, was named among the '50 Best Managed Outsourcing Vendors'.

IT, BPO to grow 10-15 pc in next 5 yrs: NASSCOM

CHENNAI: IT and BPO industry is poised to grow 15 to 20 per cent in the next five years and direct employment likely to go up to eight million, a recent survey by NASSCOM has said.

The survey has revealed that prospects of the industry growing in 50 cities in the country were bright if the state governments concentrate on developing infrastructure in these cities.

Releasing the survey, NASSCOM President Som Mittal told a press meet that the industry was focused in seven locations in the country now, employing about two million people.

The present locations - Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, National Capital Region of Delhi and Pune - might not be able to cope with the pressure developed due to setting up of new units there.

The survey said that the development of these 50 locations, including the seven, would depend on knowledge pool availability, infrastructure and social environment, government support and business environment.

The former President of NASSCOM, Lakshmi Narayanan, said the survey revealed that Tamil Nadu has the maximum number of potential IT and BPO locations, addding that Coimbatore, Madurai, Salem and Tiruchirapalli could develop like Chennai.

Earlier, inaugurating the the fifth edition of the NASSCOM's annual HRD summit, Tamil Nadu IT secretary C Chandramouli said the state would seek the help of software majors like HP and Intel for preparation of text books for IT courses in the state.

How One Outsourcer Uses Another to Keep Its Work Onshore

Offshore claims processing has traditionally been cheaper than in the United States for obvious reasons-the price of keying in data overseas is a fraction of what it is here. Antares Management Solutions, what's known as a third-party claims administrator that processes claims "under the covers" for major insurance companies, was considering going overseas when it discovered a better solution from GTESS.

Antares was feeling competitive pressure from other companies that sent keying work overseas. Jim Harless, Vice President of Operations, Antares, says, "We're competing with folks who send their work overseas to, say, India where they key and verify every single piece of data just like we do and they'll do it as low as 25 cents a claim. Our average claim-processing costs were four to eight times that, so it was tough in some situations to compete with that offshore keying service."

Harless went looking for a solution that kept the work in the United States yet allowed Antares to be competitive. In addition to the efficiencies of the GTESS technology, one of the benefits he especially liked with the GTESS solution was the fact that he can speak to the production staff and even visit the location where the work is performed if necessary. One of the biggest factors in the use of offshore work is also loss of control. "Once the claim leaves the building," he explains, "a company has very little involvement other than to talk to a service rep-it is not involved with what goes on day to day on the processing floor."

"Under the Covers" Claims Processing

When we submit a health insurance claim, most of us assume the insurance provider processes it and cuts us a check. In fact, many insurance companies outsource claims processing to a supplier known as a third-party claims administrator (TPA) like Antares. Some TPAs even do it under the insurance company's brand. These administrators even outsource part of the claims process to another supplier.

This is the relationship that Antares has created with GTESS for handling dental claims. Antares does "under the covers" claims processing under an insurance company's brand while GTESS likewise is an "under the covers" technology specialist assisting Antares in its services to that end client. So both companies are suppliers to the insurance companies that pay the claims. GTESS processes dental claims and Antares all other claims for the insurance companies with which Antares contracts.

Instead of manual keying as in an offshore operation, GTESS receives the imaged claim by FTP from Antares and extracts the relevant data that Antares would have had to otherwise "key and verify." It then returns an EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) record that Antares can feed into its adjudication engine. GTESS's business process gives Antares faster, more accurate processing and helps lower cost so it can beat out offshore competitors. EDI is the electronic communication of business transactions like claims data in a standard format, in this case in compliance with HIPAA patient privacy regulations.

Out with the Past

Harless explains that processing a claim using key and verify was labor intensive. First Antares scanned the paper claim. Then it gave the paper claim to a claims processor who would do data entry into the adjudications system. The adjudications system judges the benefits the insured person is entitled to and applies them to the processed claim, which determines the amount of the payout. The adjudication system then applies the benefits that that particular member has, based on his or her dental benefits. Then it makes a payment to the provider or the member for that particular service.

The problem was Antares keyed 80 percent of the data fields off one of the many ADA (American Dental Association) forms in the marketplace. Employees entered data fields like the date of service or procedure codes. Then the quality-assurance department stopped as many as 10 percent of these claims for review, according to Harless. Typically another person pulled up the scanned document to make sure that the person who entered all the data keyed the data elements correctly.

GTESS's Process

Using GTESS's process, Antares now simply scans the paper claims and securely FTPs all imaged claims to GTESS. GTESS first applies the correct Optical Character Recognition (OCR) dental form template and has multiple OCR engines recognize and extract the data to create a second, processable form of the electronic claim. GTESS has almost 500 dental forms registered in its system that Antares would otherwise have to create to speed OCR.

GTESS then applies business rules the buyer and supplier jointly developed to look at claim fields and decide about whether, say, data is correct or accurate. At Antares, a person would have had to make decisions-for instance, to reformat a Social Security number so the claim auto-adjudicates when returned to Antares.

Then GTESS applies provider (dentist) and member (patient) filters to insure the data in these claims sections is correct and formatted. Otherwise someone at Antares must manually do it to enable adjudication.

Finally, GTESS formats the claim in an 837 HIPAA-compliant EDI format and then and returns it to Antares for auto-adjudication.

Critical Differentiators

The especially crucial arrow in GTESS's quiver is its exhaustive business rules that govern how it treats data in fields. Usually a company like Antares has to develop rules from scratch. Or, if it's using commercial OCR software, the software vendor charges to develop appropriate rules. This is called "registering" and could be very time consuming and therefore costly. Often the vendor is not a specialist in healthcare and a buyer like Antares has to educate its programmers to help build the rules. Harless says Antares had experimented with these methods in the past with little success.

GTESS, by contrast, "already knew each and every box on the claim form and the issues associated with them. It had written various business rules for them, knew how they were commonly applied, and asked us which ways we preferred to have them applied," Harless says.

The GTESS system is also almost completely automated. The only time a claim goes to a person at GTESS is if they don't get a perfect match to tables of possible data fields or an unclear character, according to Harless. When this happens, GTESS has an exception-processing routine where a manual review and decision-making process occurs. At this point, someone identifies, say, a difficult-to-read character and makes a decision about its correctness.

To speed throughput and simplify decision-making, no one person sees the entire claim. Instead it's broken into segments; for instance, someone examines the provider section, someone else the line-item detail, and a third person the header record. Less than five percent of claims require exception handling.

Big Benefits

In doing quality assurance of GTESS's performance, Antares routinely examines claims batches. On average a batch of 400 documents with 100 characters in each yields one or two data errors. That superlative accuracy dramatically expedites auto-adjudication. Even with keying and quality assurance Harless admits he would be hard pressed to surpass that level of accuracy.

The addition of the GTESS process has allowed Antares to be more price competitive too, which has allowed it to keep its business in the United States. "We can now compete much better on price with those competitors that use low-cost keying overseas in their service offerings," says Harless. "With GTESS as a business partner, we feel that the application of technology gives us a competitive solution."

Lessons From The Outsourcing Journal:

• Outsourced key to verify work for healthcare claims processing abroad can cost eight times less than in the United States, so the only way US claims-processing companies can compete is with more efficient technology.
• A supplier with appropriate OCR forms and business rules for the specific healthcare claims being processed can radically expedite processing and improve quality.
• Keeping claims processing in the United States also helps maintain control over personnel and business processes. Managers can interact with production staff and visit the worksite.

How 1937 Economic Theory, Which Won a Nobel Prize, Helps Offshore Buyers Today By Paul Nowacki, Engagement Director, Everest Group

If you're looking for an academic reason why offshoring is good for companies, you only have to go back to a landmark economic study done in 1937. Back then, when India was still a British colony and Franklin Roosevelt was just elected President, Ronald Coase wrote an essay called "The Nature of the Firm," which led to a Nobel Prize in Economics. Today, his landmark theory has significant suggestions for both buyers and suppliers that can maximize their offshore initiatives.

In case you didn't study Coase back in the day, here's a synopsis of his thinking: In his day, most microecononomists studied the cost of production. Coase looked at the world under a different microscope: he studied the cost of transactions.

Coase measured the friction in transactions. In other words, how difficult was it to buy the ability to post an item into accounts receivable (AR)? Regarding transaction friction Coase said "the most obvious cost of organizing production through the price mechanism is discovering what the relevant prices are" that is, friction is the cost of finding a provider, getting a quote, and negotiating the final deal to get the work done. Coase theorized companies hired an AR clerk because it was too costly and troublesome to go to the external accounting firm every time it needed to post an item. The more friction in a transaction, the more likely the firm did the business process in-house.

The friction in transactions caused companies to grow because they added staff to do BPO processes internally. Employees eliminate the friction costs of buying that service. Employees in traditionally structured firms have been co-located, which made it easy to transfer documents and information. The use of employees also eliminated the need to negotiate the price for services for each and every transaction.

Offshoring and Coase

Here is how Coase explained his theory: "At the margin, the costs of organizing within the firm will be equal either to the costs of organizing in another firm or to the costs involved in leaving the transaction to be organized by the price mechanism. Businessmen will be constantly experimenting, controlling more or less, and in this way, equilibrium will be maintained. This gives the position of equilibrium for static analysis. But it is clear that the dynamic factors are also of considerable importance, and an investigation of the effect changes have on the cost of organizing within the firm and on marketing costs generally will enable one to explain why firms get larger and smaller."

The labor arbitrage driving today's BPO offshoring industry is accessible to the masses because it takes much of the friction out of transaction costs. The Internet, low communications costs, digitization, automation, ERP systems, long-term outsourcing contracts, and the emergence of a single language (English) as the global standard for business now allows companies in high-cost countries to send their work halfway across the globe to a low-cost country; that is, companies in high-cost countries can now shed employees and get smaller.

And that is exactly what has happened. Companies in high-cost countries are cutting their labor forces in human resources, finance and accounting, IT, procurement, even some engineering positions.

Lower friction facilitates offshoring along two dimensions. One is language independence. English is now the language of global business. BPO service providers feel they can hire English language skills anywhere in the world that they operate. As firms increasingly use English as a standard, work becomes more language independent and therefore location independent.

The second dimension is digitization. Technology allows the translation of paper documents into digital characters. Today paper is the enemy! Currently the most popular solution is automated workflows of digital images that the BPO service providers' employees eventually key into the financial systems in the low-cost location.

Optical character recognition (OCR) offers the ultimate promise. It should overtake digital imaging for FAO work as OCR accuracy improves and costs fall.

Predicting BPO's Future with Oracle's Tibor Beles

Tibor Beles, VP Sales, Global BPO, heads Oracle's BPO practice. Read why he thinks HRO buyers will take a more aggressive outsourcing approach in the future, how IT will bring innovation to BPO processes, and why time is so critical to outsourcing transactions.

Q: What is Oracle's outsourcing strategy?
A: Our strategy is to focus on providing the software and additional value-add services to the BPO supplier. When a qualified supplier offers services on our technology, we say they are delivering BPO Powered by Oracle.

Our goal is to help suppliers reduce time to revenue, cut cost, and improve profitability while addressing their innovation challenges.

Q: Why is Oracle interested in the BPO market?
A: We see a significant opportunity in the BPO market because today buyers expect improved service delivery from their suppliers. It takes a different approach and next-generation technology to support change.

Q: Is there a particular type of supplier you work with?
A: We are working with leading business process outsourcers (BPOs) and providing our technology and applications solutions to support their outsourced offerings. These relationships will give our customers more choice in deciding how to leverage investments in Oracle software and help them reduce costs and increase efficiencies.

Q: Since you work with suppliers and buyers, you have a unique perspective on the market. Where do you think BPO is going?
A: I think transactional human resources outsourcing (HRO) will continue to grow, and transformational outsourcing will grow over time. BPO buyers will reconsider what is tactical and what is strategic, and the answers to those questions will grow broader over time. Buyers will take a more aggressive approach to BPO in the future, but, at the same time, their choices will be more complex.

I also see an increase in the demand for industry-specific BPO offerings.

Q: Any advice for BPO buyers?
A: Buyers have to understand that the technology component of a BPO offering is a significant part of the BPO decision. Buyers should be familiar with the platform the supplier is using, as it will speed the implementation process.

Additionally, buyers have to know if they can transition back to an in-house model at a later date. Changing market demands and unpredictable business challenges can impact how organizations need to manage certain business processes, or they may outgrow the services of a specific BPO supplier. So, buyers should know up front if it is possible to move to an in-house model.

Q: What is the biggest issue in BPO today?
A: Time to revenue. Time matters so much in this business. Suppliers have to figure out how to onboard a new buyer in the shortest possible time. Time is equally as important to the buyer because they want to leverage outsourcing benefits as quickly as possible.

Q: Are there any other challenges on the horizon?
A: BPO suppliers have to find a way to grow their businesses with sustained profitability. New entrants will have to find a way to differentiate, grow their businesses, and generate profitable revenue.

Buyers will have to deal with a couple of challenges, the first being process-integration issues. They will demand integration be as seamless and inexpensive as possible. At the same time, they will want to find a way to reduce the amount of management attention dedicated to the process they just outsourced. It's also important for buyers to find a way to establish a good working relationship with their suppliers.

Ideally, BPO is a win-win deal for both parties. The buyer enjoys reduced cost and process improvement; the supplier has higher revenues.

Q: What are some of today's BPO risks?
A: Buyers have to worry whether the supplier is going to deliver as agreed. Will the supplier be able to integrate its platform with the buyer's?

Q: What is the best way to take out cost in a BPO deal?
A: The majority of BPO deals today involve offshoring because it is a significant way to take out unnecessary cost. Labor arbitrage is not the only value-creation option, however; software can also drive cost savings.

Q: How does a supplier improve the process?
A: Innovation is the key. You have to improve the process design and workflows with supporting technology. For example, the functionality in Oracle Applications can help suppliers innovate. Because business analytics require superior software functionality, the supplier has a great opportunity to complement the solutions it is already providing with Oracle Applications that offer business analytic capabilities. Analytics can greatly improve the process.

Another area where technology can improve process is in human resources, specifically in employee training programs. Training can be costly and complicated. However by offering training to employees through a self-service model, it becomes easier and less costly.

Q: Are current outsourcing contracts structured for innovation?
A: Service level agreements (SLAs) have to be flexible, as it's important to leave room for innovation.

Q: How did you learn your global focus?
A: In 1998 I moved to Singapore in a regional position heading market development in Asia Pacific for another software company. I sold solutions to service providers; back then it was application service providers (ASPs) and collaboration hubs.

In 2000 I returned back to Europe in a global position selling collaborative enterprise applications. Working on new, innovative software offerings in a dynamic global market gave me great exposure to solution delivery challenges.

Since 2002 I have been focusing on selling and delivering IT platforms to and developing partnerships with BPO suppliers. The BPO IT platform is similar to large enterprise-wide IT deployment, only on a more complex scale.

Q: What's your view about standardization?
A: Standardized platforms help lower cost and accelerate customer onboarding. Smart standardization should not hinder flexibility, however; it should configure rather than customize IT.

Q: So how did you cross the divide from IT to BPO?
A: In 2002 there was a good opportunity for application providers to leverage BPO because of the changing market?buyers were considering global, multi-process deals. Existing platforms didn't support these kinds of deals.

Q. Where were you born?
A: Slovakia. I graduated with a computer science degree from Slovak Technical University. But I learned most about business in the executive management program at the Harvard Business School.

Q: Where do you live now?
A: Munich. I visit Bratislava, my hometown, often.

Q: What's been the most formative business book you've read?
A: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I recognized many of his examples as true. It's an incredibly convincing business book with a strong human dimension. I have a 15-year-old daughter; his advice about dealing with teenagers was priceless. He gave me great life information!

Q: Did you have someone who influenced your career?
A: John Donovan conducted a management session at MIT that I attended. He said, "If you can dream it, you can do it." He was telling a story about a disabled girl who was able to climb a mountain. I realized he was right: everything starts with a dream. That was an inspirational statement. It spoke to me, a person coming from a small country, which has seen a lot of transitions.

Q: What's your favorite movie?
A: As Good As It Gets with Jack Nicolson and Helen Hunt. It's a rarity: a really good comedy. The movie got the right name?it is as good as it gets.

Q: What's your favorite sport?
A: I enjoy playing tennis and watching ice hockey and soccer.

Q: If you could do something different, what would it be?
A: Now, at Oracle, I have my dream job!

Publish Date: July 2007

Despite U.S. Recession, BPO's Future Looks Bright

The economic recession in the United States has affected the BPOs in India. But this has not totally fractured the outsourcing industry, as there are scopes opening up beyond US like Europe and Australia or changing client exposure.

THE BUSINESS Process Outsourcing (BPO) vendors having United States based clients share mixed reactions due to the temporary slump in the US economy. This will be further heightened till the time final election results are not out and the new president doesn’t announce some relief with string of measures to combat the credit crunch heat.

Those BPOs or KPOs, which focus on large US companies or big ticket outsourcing contracts, are facing the recession crisis as seen by the delays in contract renewals or temporary freeze in awarding of new contracts. One of the associated factors is the lengthened decision-making time with a lot of top heads losing their jobs under the recession pressure.

Large companies have now focussed their energies on restructuring their companies through vertical acquisitions or major divestitures besides analysing their internal processes. This has chiefly been observed with IT and financial service companies. It seems that ’outsourcing’ is now on the back-burner for them, as they focus more on meeting their budgeted business targets first.

But there’s some hope in these tough times. The economic crisis has forced the small to mid-sized US companies to assess outsourcing as an option as they struggle to survive against the big mammoths. They are re-evaluating their internal processes to find solutions within tight business budget constraints. This, in fact, opens up a galore of opportunities for BPOs and KPOs from India, which focus on small to mid-sized US clients with revenues lesser than $5 million.

There are few other smart choices available too, like looking beyond the US to stretch the sights to Europe and Australia or changing the client exposure from the typical IT and financial service clients to other industry verticals.