IBM’s Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) services subsidiary has grown to 20,000 employees from about 6,000 two years ago, the company announced Tuesday.

In 2004, IBM acquired Daksh eServices, a BPO company in Gurgaon near Delhi, and renamed it IBM Daksh Business Process Services. It expanded the scope of the subsidiary’s services to include business transformation services that helped customers make their processes more efficient. The operation has about 40 customers.

A large number of multinational services companies including Accenture of Bermuda, Capgemini of France and Electronic Data Systems of Plano, Texas, are expanding fast in India. Indian subsidiaries of multinational companies, including service providers, now account for about 75 percent of India’s offshore call center and BPO business, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies in Delhi.

IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., has also expanded the number of staff it employs in India for software development. IBM’s operations in India have about 43,000 staff, up from 9,000 employees at the beginning of 2004, the company said. The company did not disclose how many of these staff are in software development and related work.

By expanding in India, multinational service providers are now able to compete on price with Indian outsourcers for foreign outsourcing contracts, according to Siddharth Pai, a partner with Technology Partners International of Houston, Texas.

-John Ribeiro, IDG News Service

For related news coverage, read Sprint, IBM in Court over Outsourcing Deal.

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