Rebecca Goldthwaite, vice-president, Strategic Partner Management, Global Production & Manufacturing Services, Cengage Learning Inc, on Friday launched the CII-Publishing BPO Forum that will work as a think tank to address challenges and provide leadership to industry for fuelling growth.
Sriram Subramanya,Chairman, CII-Publishing BPO Panel, said the forum was formed to share experiences and helps promote excellence across industry; bring under one roof all the industry players to create healthy networking platform to facilitate discussion on industry trends, challenges, best practices, next practices, current issues and initiatives.
The forum will meet on the ninth Friday of every quarter. Delivering the theme address at the third edition of ‘Publishing BPO Services,' he said that the aim of conference was to sustain India as the Publishing BPO Services hub of the world. As a step in this direction, they were in the process of introducing Publishing BPO Services curriculum in colleges affiliated to the University of Madras; conduct road shows in colleges to attract talents and have social networking forums.
“We have already introduced the curriculum in Periyar Maniammai University and Annamalai University. We have already received in-principle approval from the University of Madras to introduce the courses from the next academic year. It will be a three year degree course with the students being taught printing, publishing and digital each year,” he said.
According to Mr. Subramanya, the publishing BPO Services would be a $1.2 billion industry employing more than 74,000 people by 2012. To meet the demand of skilled workers, diploma and six-months certified courses would be introduced soon.
Ms. Goldthwaite urged Indian vendors to focus on investing in training, technology, innovative processes and the development of new service offerings to keep pace with industry needs.
In his welcome address, CII Chennai Zone, chairman, Anand Sundaresan, said: “India by itself is a major book publishing country with more than 15,000 publishing houses generating content in more than 24 regional languages. The e-Publishing industry in India is in a fast growth trajectory path.”
CII Chennai Zone,convenor, IT, ITES & Electronics Panel, S. Sridharan highlighted the opportunity for Publishing BPO Services in the Middle East countries and said Indian expertise in content creation and technology could be leveraged for generating local employment and improvement of industry in the region.
