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Q & A: IT Service Providers

What skills should I have? Diplomas and short courses in web designing would be handy skills for this field.
What is my investment? Your creativity.
What is my market? Private companies, institutions, or smaller establishments.
What returns can I expect? Website creation rates range from Rs 1,000 per home page to Rs 1,500 if flash and graphics are used. Website maintenance is more lucrative where you upload the pages and content provided by the client on a weekly or monthly basis. Annual Maintenance Contracts (AMCs) are signed from Rs 20,000 upwards depending upon the company and your negotiation skills.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)
This is perhaps the segment which promises the largest wealth and employment generation for India in the years to come. Call Centres and BPO related establishments that have sprung up in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune and now Kolkata are buzzing with activity. As a small home-based professional, you will have to explore a specialised niche for yourself — maybe medical transcription if you have the background or translations of Business Contracts and Memoranda of Understandings (MOUs) between organisations if you are a linguist and know foreign languages. But remember, these are very specialised and competitive assignments. Breaking in would depend entirely on your contacts and perhaps with a lucky net search you may strike gold.

There are electronic and computer engineers who work for American companies. The work involved in these assignments is not more than six to seven hours a week but due to cut-throat competition in this segment, entrepreneurs do not reveal the names of clients who are based in the USA and UK.

Q & A: Business Process Outsourcing

What skills should I have? A course in medical transcription would help; so would knowing a foreign language.
What is my investment? No monetary investment, apart from your course fees that is.
What is my market? You can offer your skills to BPO centres; any direct contact with foreign companies looking to outsource will also help.
What returns can I expect? Payments in this field are made by the word ie 5 to 10 cents per word, which works out to be quite lucrative. There are electronic and computer engineers who are paid monthly fees of US $500 by American companies who outsource certain operations.

Computer Services ...and more