Today we had two lectures, one over Business Process Outsourcing and the other over Intellectual Property Rights. The first lecture over BPO was given to us by Mr. Ashwin Hoskota, a Senior VP for Hinduja Global Solutions. So far this was the best lecture we’ve had. Despite a power outage that delayed his power point presentation he did a really good job of keeping all of us engaged. The main thing I really took away from this lecture was that India is an outsourcing area for a ton of things. It is a common assumption in America that all IT support and call centers are in India. This is not true. While India does have an excellent IT industry they no longer take the majority of the world’s call center calls. Instead the Philippines is now where most of the calls go to. However, India is the main player in different back office functions being outsourced. Whether it is payroll functions, legal work, finance, or information technology, India has many firms competing to provide these services. One really fascinating thing we learned was that the company that does the animation for Pixar is located in India.
Our second lecture was delivered by Dr. Pinaki Ghosh, a Chief Intellectual Property Officer at Infosys. This lecture was not as enjoyable as the first one because he did not involve us as much as the first lecturer. We did learn a bit about all the different issues companies face with Intellectual Property Rights though. What was fascinating to learn was that many companies, including IBM and Qualcomm, make billions of dollars each year simply by licensing out products that they hold patents on. We also learned that trying to protect the intellectual property is an extremely complex task and can cost lots of money. While this subject was rather fascinating it was a little overwhelming and I think all the students enjoyed the first lecture a little bit more.
After our lectures and lunch we had the opportunity to visit one of Timken’s offices in India. I’m sure all of you reading this are aware of Timken but for those of you who are not they are a major player in the ball bearing industry. The office we visited in India was extremely nice. It was a 7.5 acre campus that had beautiful gardens and looked more like a resort than a corporation. We learned about how Timken has some extremely state-of-the-art equipment that does technology testing for their components that are produced around the world. This Timken campus also had one of their IT centers (the other being in Canton) and it was really need to see the room full of servers and all the computer screens that they use to remotely solve Timken IT issues from around the globe.