One on One with Avasant's Kevin Parikh

Avasant Senior Partner and Global CEO Kevin Parikh has billions of dollars of deals in outsourcing and business transactions under his belt in his career. Avasant works with governments and Fortune 500 companies to not only source skilled workers, but to optimize technology in a way that saves them money and time. Avasant is seeing some pretty impressive growth; 2012 saw a 35 percent jump in revenue, and midway through 2013 that number is already at 43 percent, and the firm has conducted more than 1,000 engagements in 40 countries. Parikh shared his insights with Consulting One on One about trends in the BPO market, what clients are looking for, and how Avasant makes it happen for them.

Consulting: What are some of the big trends in global outsourcing these days?

Parikh: An overall trend to take advantage of outsourcing from a corporate social responsibility standpoint. In fact, Avasant was recently asked by the Rockefeller Foundation to support an initiative called impact sourcing. What impact sourcing does is target rural and socioeconomically deprived regions around the world and looks for ways to improve skills and identify those locations or individuals as impact sourcing beneficiaries. What that means is we're looking for areas in our companies, which are primarily Fortune 500 clients, they're looking for corporate responsibility tools and impact sourcing is one of them when they outsource. We're also seeing more outsourcing in the public sector. That's taking place not so much offshore like many would assume, but taking place in local cities with private companies that are North America based. The third, is still global offshoring, to take advantage of labor arbitrage overseas and using skilled workers from an IT and business process standpoint. The only difference here is we're not just looking at countries like India today, but our clients are looking to outsource to various emerging market locations, including those in Latin America and Eastern European locations.