Outsourcing for the win: Sri Lanka recognized at EOA Awards

Tea, Rubber and Coconut have traditionally been out main exports, but it looks like outsourced services might render the rest obsolete. Sri Lanka’s been recognized by yet another offshoring award – this time, by the European Outsourcing Association. We’ve been shortlisted for the Offshoring Destination of the Year at the EOA Awards.

Needless to say, we’re already among the  Top 25 Global Outsourcing destinations by AT Kearney, and quite a lot of global companies have their fingers in the Sri Lankan Pie – Sri Lanka acts as an off-shore development center and joint venture development center to several Fortune 500 companies and industry leaders from the North American continent, Great Britain, Australia, Sweden, Norway, and Japan.  Tax benefits for investors and BPO employees, a growing workforce of qualified graduates and relatively low human resource costs continue to make Sri Lanka extremely attractive to clients. To quote SLASSCOM:

“Foreign entities that have invested in Sri Lanka have already begun to tap the local talent; HSBC, Industrial & Financial Systems (IFS), Amba Research, RR Donnelley, WNS,Virtusa, Pearson,Valista, Millennium Information Technology (owned by London Stock Exchange), and Innodata Isogen are overseas investors that have become firm believers. However, there are also over 300 other Local IT companies such as Informatics, hSenid, John Keells, DMS that also operate within a fiercely competitive environment. Among Globally recognized customers of Sri Lankan ICT products and services are names such as JP Morgan, Google, Microsoft, Qatar Airways and Emirates.”

This is in addition to Virtusa, for example, which has been pinpointed as one of the top 20 outsourcing service providers in the world. Some time ago, Sri Lanka’s IT industry was also appointed the “National Outsourcing Destination of the Year” by the UK-based NOA Awards held in October, 2013. There are literally hundreds of medium size and small sized companies (most of them based in or around Colombo) earning through outsourced development here in Sri Lanka, not to mention some massive fish along the likes of John Keells, all of which are collectively competing very well with their China and India.

Sri Lanka’s well set to grow. IT/BPO is currently the fifth largest revenue-earner in the country. There’s a certain level of skilled unemployment, which is great news for people who want to recruit. As Dr Arul Sivagananathan points out in Outsource Magazine, Sri Lanka has its fair share of of problems – high bandwidth, electricity costs, lack of English language skills outside Colombo and so on – but we’re definitely on the road to fame as one of the best places to outsource to.