4 years ago I wrote a piece on sandhill.com titled “Software’s new menace: BPO”
I wrote “corporations increasingly want “cooked food” (which BPO can provide) whereas the software industry still wants to sell raw food and Weber grills to customers so they can cook at home”
The banter with Phil Fersht of AMR Research over the last week made me think about the state of BPO.
Frankly I have been dismayed to see many, many BPO offerings which offer to merely take over the customer’s SAP or Oracle or other ERP backbones, rather than offer a compelling transaction engine of their own.
Why are BPO vendors not leveraging SaaS offerings like NetSuite and salesforce to deliver business processes for a lot cheaper? Why like ADP have they not invested in proprietary transaction engines particularly when it comes to vertical industry specific nuances?
In some ways it is the worst of both worlds. Bring your own food, and we will cook it for you and then sell you beer and wine at $ 6 a glass.
I tell you what, the restaurant ambience better be darned good for that business model to continue….
