Why Outsource your IT in Philippines?

General Outlook

The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry is the fastest growing industry in the Philippines, and has had a better than expected performance in 2010 according to the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP). The Industry posted a whopping 26% revenue growth to 8.9 billion USD and added 100,000 new jobs to 525,000. The main driver of this increase are value-added, non-voice jobs, which grew the fastest at 30%, according to BPAP chairman Alfredo Ayala (IT / BPO sees stronger growth than projected). However, the voice sector has also increased dramatically, outpacing India in numbers of jobs and revenue in 2010!

We notice that all major IT-BPO sectors are expanding at an impressive pace, both on the amount of jobs and on the increased complexity of the jobs outsourced to the Philippines. Companies outsourcing projects for their customers or their own departments are now looking for higher added value services from their providers and the Philippines is definitely a place where this becomes possible, thanks to major assets of the people and business environment.

Real Life Experience

Those impressive figures are in line with what I have been able to experience since Arcanys has been founded in 2010 in Cebu City, where the IT Park is currently undergoing major developments to sustain the amazing demand for BPO offices.

The major reasons why the outsourcing for voice and non-voice services such as software development, back and mid-office business support, high-value knowledge process outsourcing are growing at such an impressive pace are grounded by:

Suitable and abundant talent
- Excellent work attitude and customer orientation
- Considerable pool of generalist and specialist talents
- Strong English skills, both verbal and written
- Western cultural adaptability and background

Quality Infrastructure
- World-class telecommunications
- Good infrastructures in Tier 1 and 2 cities

Conductive Business Environment
- Competitive incentives
- BPAP lobbying to facilitate business

Operational Performance
- Affordable Labor
- Genuine global reputation and established BPO destination

Since the BPO industry has been established for quite some time and thanks to the American education system legacy, Filipinos are well prepared to compete with ease in the BPO market.

In addition to the relative political stability, warmth of the people, the very strong western influence of the american culture makes communication work like a bliss between locals and expats. This is the main advantage in day-to-day relations with the Filipino staff and allows to increase the efficiency of the operations.

This ease is in strong contrast with my experiences dealing with Chinese and Indian outsourcing providers, where the quality of the communication is much lower, mainly due to cultural issues rather than language issues. The output can still be of very good quality, but if it doesn’t match the initial requirements, there is a lot of room for wasted resources and failed projects. Arcanys decided to keep a western management team on-site in order to guarantee en even higher success rate of projects.

Philippines to be discovered by European businesses as an outsourcing location

Americans, thanks to the close ties with Filipinos have been working with the Philippines for quite a while, but remains relatively unknown for most of European countries because of the distance and the existence of nearer outsourcing places and also probably because of the bad reputation of the country, that I believe is largely overstated. However, when you take a closer look at what the Philippines has to offer despite the distance, I am convinced that all the advantages that have been enumerated above outrank from far all other European, Asian and South American locations. In addition, it’s really nice to live on a paradisiacal island…. where the weather is never an issue.