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The
UK-based insurance giant Aviva plans to transfer 2,900 employees from its third party BPO partners, EXL and WNS, to its own offshore division - Aviva Global Services (AGS), in the current calendar year, a company executive said in Bangalore recently. Aviva, the UK's largest insurance company and the world's fifth largest, said it has successfully completed the transfer of over 1,600 employees at its Bangalore operations from
Aviva had built the offshore BPO roles in partnership with three vendor partners — EXL, WNS and 24/7 Customer — under the BOT (Build, Operate, Transfer) contract with them that has enabled it to ramp up rapidly and gain the 'speed to market'. The transfer of these employees to AGS means that Aviva can avoid paying "premium" to the vendor partners, and the move has also stemmed from the fact that "the operations are now relatively stable", said AGS CEO Rajnish Virmani. The transfers from third party BPO vendor staff to own offshore division by Aviva is seen as a first move of its kind and size in the Indian BPO industry. "As we prepare for more of the transfers through the year, this successfully executed transfer will serve as a great learning," said Virmani. Of the 2,900 new transfers, 300 would be moved from WNS centre in Colombo and 2,600 of WNS and EXL put together in Pune, officials said. Terming the transfers as a
"significant step" for the Indian ITeS industry, NASSCOM President Kiran Karnik was quoted as saying in a Aviva statement that several other players have been waiting and watching to see how the BOT model works.
TCS inks pact
with IIT-Kanpur Tata Consultancy Services recently signed an MoU with IIT Kanpur to promote higher education and research in storage computing and related technologies. As part of the collaboration, both the organisations will offer a postgraduate course on Storage Computing Architecture, a TCS release said in New Delhi. The MoU would also cover joint research projects, which are relevant to address the technology and business needs of the booming global storage industry, including TCS customers in this space, it added. TCS will also establish a storage computing laboratory at IIT Kanpur and will sponsor students for the new course and provide project work for the students, it added. "We see the demand for cost efficient storage services as a key trend for the future," TCS CEO and Managing Director S. Ramadorai said.
IBM announces
Ph.D and CAS student winners IBM recently announced winners of the "IBM Best Ph.D Students Award" and "IBM Best CAS Students Award" for this year. Prof Robert J Aumann, the 2005 Noble Prize laureate in Economics, will give a talk on "War and Peace" at the award ceremony to be held in Bangalore soon, and present the awards, the company said in a
statement. This year's winners are students from the Indian Institute of Science, Indian Institute of Technology and Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Prof Aumann will hand the IBM Best PhD Students Award to S Kannan, IIT- Madras, S Asharaf, IISc, Sobhan Babu, IIT - Bombay, Parag K Chaudhuri, IIT - Delhi, Md. Abdul Hai Zahid, IIT - Roorke and Piyush Kurur, IMSc, Chennai while Rudresh Acharyua, IISc and Vinay Kumar (M.Tech), IIT Kanpur will receive the IBM Best CAS Students Award,
it said. — PTI
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