Manoj Punja is currently the Senior Vice President & Global Head of Wipro BPO. In his current role, Manoj provides strategic and operational guidance to the business unit (Wipro BPO) towards strengthening its position of being a business and an operational transformation partner for clients. Manoj is responsible for furthering the growth initiatives, business development, client satisfaction and leading profitability improvement for Wipro BPO.

Prior to taking up this, role he was the Chief Sales and Operations officer for the Focus Geography which included Latin America, Africa, France, Germany and Canada. He also headed Wipro’s Global Sales Operations function. Manoj was the Chief Sales and Operations Officer for the North America from 2008 to 2010.

As chief Sales and operations officer he managed Wipro's IT business across all business units. His responsibilities included sales, business development, client satisfaction and operations including local delivery centers. In this role Manoj started the LATAM operations, redefined sales processes and implemented new Global CRM systems, revamped sales teams, established new premier customer program and helped build local capability and presence resulting in significant revenue growth.

From 2002 to 2008 Manoj served as the Global Head of TMTS (Technology, Media, Transportation, and the Services) Industry business unit. In this role he was responsible for business development, competency development, client satisfaction and service delivery. Under his leadership, the business unit saw phenomenal growth with revenues that increased 10-fold in six years and a heightened global presence.

Manoj joined Wipro in 1991. He has since led various groups in Wipro including the software products division, strategic resourcing, and sales for Asia-Pacific region. His experience spans sales, marketing, HR and operations functions. Through his career Manoj has sought challenging and non-traditional assignments. Manoj holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Management and a Bachelor’s Degree Engineering in Electronics from Bangalore University and lives in New Jersey, USA.

The opportunity that comes with Shared Services and BPO remains very significant indeed. But the surprising thing is that this opportunity actually remains relatively untapped – both in terms of broader market penetration and in terms of scope within and across functions and service lines inside implementing organizations. While many organizations adopt shared services and outsourcing to some extent, their programs are still far from being as broad and comprehensive as they could be. This is true in both the Private Sector and even more so in the Public Sector. So, as practitioners, we need to do a better job of explaining and delivering the real and sustainable benefits from successfully implemented Shared Services/BPO, especially in this continuing challenging global economy.

Net Cloud is the real story for 2013 as network price declines have provided the opportunity for cloud to emerge.

Radical network price declines over the past several years have reduced annual network infrastructure operating spend by up to 50%. Over time, these savings have been strategically reinvested leading to significant cost reductions in contract rates, SIP adoption and most importantly, increased cloud adoption. The Small and Medium Business (SMB) sector will benefit immensely from the ever declining network costs. Typically, the SMB sector cannot afford to build their own infrastructure - nor do they have the resources to support it. However, declining costs of bandwidth and services coupled with the maturing of virtualization makes the cloud offering affordable and attractive to the SMB sector.

In short, the continued decrease of network pricing along with emerging network technologies and infrastructure virtualization allows for increased cloud adoption – Net Cloud.

One of the biggest “silent killers” of shared services value is ineffective governance. In my advisory work, I have seen companies with excellent shared services processes and infrastructure still struggle with issues arising from lack of stakeholder alignment with shared services vision and objectives. When corporate, customers, and the SSO itself lack effective mechanisms to align their efforts, unnecessary costs creep back into the service delivery organization, and service quality suffers. The catch-22 is that the less effective a company is at shared services governance, the more difficult it is for leaders to recognize that governance could be an issue. If you’re not used to managing relationships across silos, you’re less likely to look at the way the silos interact when investigating a problem. Companies with effective shared services governance, in contrast, tend to be better at identifying and resolving problems that arise from cross-silo conflicts, as well as driving end-to-end continuous improvement.

Shantanu Ghosh is responsible for all Genpact Service Line Practice Development, Solutions and Transitions globally. He joined Genpact in early 2005 and built its Finance & Accounting Business for Global Customers outside GE making Genpact an industry leader in the F&A space. He frequently represents Genpact at industry platforms and contributes to the industry media through white papers, discussions and webinars.

Prior to joining Genpact, Shantanu was CFO for GE, India. He was part of the country leadership team with oversight responsibility for all GE Businesses in India. Apart from the routine activities, he led the implementation of GE’s risk and compliance frameworks in the different operating companies, was the Head of GE’s Corporate Audit team in India and was the owner of GE’s FMP (Finance Management training Program) for India. Prior to this, he was the CFO and Pricing Leader for GE’s Consumer Finance business in India.

Before GE, Shantanu worked with Unilever India for close to a decade. He joined as a commercial management trainee and did stints across factories, profit centers, corporate accounting and in his last role, was the Commercial Head for its largest region - Western India. Prior to that Shantanu was also one of the 12 core members of the Chairman’s Millennium project team in 1999 to craft the Unilever strategy in India for the new millennium.

Shantanu is a Chartered Accountant from PriceWaterhouse and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce from Calcutta University.

Look for this to be the year of the services integrator. Consider the number of permeations of shared services delivery mechanisms today:

• Cloud solutions such as Workday being deployed by mid- and increasingly large-cap companies
• Multi-sourcing across a set of increasingly specialized outsourcing providers
• Internal captive centers using various software providers and systems integrators
• Global Business Services with a focus on cleaning out the white spaces between numerous multifunctional processes on an end-to-end basis

All of these delivery mechanisms require someone to tightly integrate the various providers and processes around the world. Keep an eye on who plays the integrator role – companies acting alone with their own resources, companies using a single or few service providers as a service integrator, or companies using external advisors for parts of service governance and vendor management.

The simultaneous emergence of consumerization, cloud computing, mobility, specialized third-party services and the whole as-a-service world strongly suggests that many current IT practices and organizations, and business process operations, will fundamentally change. A cycle exists between commoditization (a common process of business evolution) and the creation of new activities (genesis). This cycle is not smooth but punctuated. Change builds up behind barriers such as customer risk, technical requirements and vendor inertia. When these barriers are broken, a flood of change is released.

Cloud Computing and Open Source solutions have introduced a state of "war" in the IT industry and "next generation" organizations (in terms of structure, cycle time of change, practices and activities) are now appearing within Enterprise IT and the Supplier community

My journey, as CEO of Capgemini BPO, began with its inception in 2004. We have travelled far since this time, accompanying our clients and their evolving requirements. They have progressed from looking for traditional cost savings to something more comprehensive: top line growth, rapid implementation of change, and risk reduction. “Assured Outcomes” is the mantra of the day, where suppliers commit to deliver tangible business benefits for clients.

To navigate towards a successful collaboration, providers must master platform-based BPO delivering superior processes enabled by the right technology. That is why Capgemini BPO is committed to working closely with the client and to integrating their outcomes into the client’s global business service organizations.

Economic pressures, changing demographics, and maturing technologies are driving business decision makers to look for new ways to rethink work to generate value. A recent Cognizant global study suggests that business as usual will lead to degeneration of performance causing organizations to miss out on newer technologies, enhanced productivity benefits, and better business agility in the face of rapid market evolution. We believe that newer business models will emerge based on reengineered operating models that focus on modernizing process work, relook at what is core to business, and make the vision for the future of work real.

Additionally, process aligned technologies, or what we call SMAC stack - Social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) - will help companies unlock value and improve business process performance. All these changes will influence organizational agility and ability to compete in the market. For BPS vendors, there are vast opportunities and challenges at this intersection of technology and business process services. Vendor ecosystems needs to keep a step ahead of these changes, and be able seamlessly integrate technology, analytics and process expertise based on knowledge of the client industry.

A few Fortune 500 companies have already started working with CFO’s who are not really finance professional. They are business experts tasked with driving growth beyond the financial cliff. This focus on driving growth is expected to be the norm going forward. This in turn will change the expectation from the shared services to move beyond driving financial efficiencies. The shared services team will increasingly help the CFO and the board in extracting insights out of the data they have at hand to make the business more agile in seizing opportunities (acquisitions, new markets, new manufacturing locations etc.) and avoiding liabilities (forex hedging, timely divestiture etc.). In mature shared services delivered in house or through partners, day to day transaction processing is either automated to straight through processing or simplified to be delegated to fresher accountants. The experienced professionals are thus free to address this expectation from the CFO and the business. This will set the norm over the next few years with the "Chief Value Officers" driving this across the organization