The global IT services company HCL announced yesterday the opening of a new 36,000-square-foot delivery center in Frisco, Texas. Reports say the opening of the facility will initially bring 300 local jobs to the Frisco community and offer space for an additional 200 employees in the future.
By adding a fifth U.S. center to its global delivery model, HCL enhances its ability to support U.S. clients from a central-time-zone location. While HCL has expanded its typical offshore model with offices in Mexico and Brazil, these locations alone don’t always meet the requirements of a U.S. client seeking to leverage a service provider’s local resources as part of its global outsourcing contract.
This new location is ideal for HCL. By opening a center in the heart of Texas’ technology hub, HCL is able to take advantage of in-state expertise from its Houston office to ensure a successful start and, at the same time, prepare for expansion, which will surely happen as HCL acquires new projects from new and existing clients. The Frisco location is also near an airline hub, meaning personnel are only a short plane ride away from North American clients who might require swift onsite presence.
Mature outsourcing clients that have evolved past yesterday’s typical onshore/offshore model know that, short of being at the client site, nothing beats “same-time-zone-ness” combined with geographic proximity. With the ongoing fight for talent in India – and despite the assurances of their service providers – too many clients have experienced NOT having the “A” team offshore to help during U.S. working hours.
Having fresh people who are happy with their working hours and who can hop on the phone at 2 p.m. EST to work through a real-time production issue or an acceptance tester’s questions is immeasurably important. No, I take that back. It is measurable – the cycle time reduction is a day’s duration of work!
A mix of onshore and offshore centers can be a huge advantage for companies as our world becomes ever more interconnected. One of my recent non-government clients has concerns about utilizing offshore employees because of a new, seemingly simple requirement that, in addition to U.S. customer data, they process and service U.S. government employee data. For both political and security reasons, the U.S. federal government looks very unfavorably at offshoring government data.
Onshore centers solve this problem, and – when combined with offshore centers – enable an enterprise to optimally select the right skills, the right time zone and the right citizenship at the right price point. The simple onshore/offshore delivery model is evolving to the smarter and more highly optimized multi-shored model that savvy enterprises are taking advantage of today.
Like TCS, which announced in October its intentions to open a service center in Ohio, and Cognizant, which announced in November its intentions to open a delivery center in North Carolina, HCL is certainly on the leading edge of the trend toward multi-shore delivery. For those looking to optimize their outsourcing efforts, it’s worth taking a long, hard look at the smart moves these major service providers are making.
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