By Prince Osuagwu

CHAIRMAN of technology company, iSON BPO, Mr. Ramesh Awtaney, has challenged Nigeria to encourage business outsourcing because of its great potential to develop the Nigerian economy.

Speaking in Lagos, he said outsourcing had been tested in India for decades and found to be a sure economic enabler.

iSON boss, Ramesh Awtaney

Awtaney said, “what will not work in the Nigerian economy is offshoring. Taking a job from Nigeria to execute in India, which is offshoring, is not a good business plan. Staying in Nigeria to operate support service business, which is outsourcing, is of course a business model that will work in Nigeria, just the way it is working well in India.

What we do at iSON is to develop intellectual property and bring it to the job place and we do not take the job to places where there is already developed intellectual property. What we are saying is that we train local skills and allow them to do the job, rather than taking the job out of Nigeria to places where there are developed skilled manpower.

When we started operations in Nigeria in 2011, we said to ourselves that the combination of outsourcing and offshoring will not work for us in Nigeria because we do not see it as a good business model. We believe in the transformation that outsourcing brings, hence our business in Nigeria is all about outsourcing alone, where we train local skills to do the job in Nigeria. What we are doing is to bring the skills and knowledge of outsourcing from India and develop it in Nigeria, in order to replicate India’s growth in business outsourcing in Nigeria. In doing so, we need to create an outsourcing industry for Nigerians. In our business model, offshoring is completely out of it because we want to give Nigeria the best of service that will impact positively on the country’s economy and on her citizens” he added.

Explaining his company’s contributions in the country’s economy, Awtaney noted that in the last four years iSON has trained Nigerians to do the job in addition to opening call centres in different cities of the country.”

He also said that the company had employed over 4,000 Nigerians with plans to increase the number to over 5,000 by the end of the year.