IBM To Buy Indian Outsourcer

IBM says it plans to acquire an Indian business services firm that provides offshore customer care for Sprint, Amazon, Yahoo, and a number of other well-known U.S. companies.

Under the deal, terms of which weren't disclosed, IBM will take a full ownership stake in Daksh eServices, which operates customer-care centers in the Indian cities of New Delhi and Mumbai. It also recently opened a contact center in the Philippines.

Daksh has more than $30 million in annual revenue and employs about 5,000 customer-service representatives. In interviews, company executives have said they expect Daksh's sales to grow to about $100 million by next year and headcount to rise to 10,000.

The company, founded in 2000, chiefly provides voice, E-mail, and live chat customer-support services for multinational companies in a range of industries using, among other things, contact-management applications from Concerto Software. It also provides mortgage-processing services for Citigroup's mortgage unit.

Although Daksh is a relatively small player, some analysts believe it could provide IBM with an entry point to larger customers. "Daksh has some fairly big accounts into which IBM would like to sell a whole range of products and services," says Technology Business Research's Bob Sutherland.