Chennai: At a time when business process outsourcing (BPO) units are making a beeline to India and other cheaper locations, setting up a centre in the US certainly makes news. And the newsmaker is the $25-million revenue Slash Support Inc., US, with its $1- million facility in San Jose where it is hiring locals.

The company's Chennai-based 100-per cent subsidiary, Slash Support India Pvt Ltd, manages four centres that employ around 2,500 people. The fourth centre was recently opened in Chennai and the company has also announced its plans to set up centres in tier 11 cities within a couple of years. The company also has a redundancy centre in Singapore.

Responds executive vice president Sanjiva Singh, "We have opened the new facility at the specific request of an existing client. With this centre, we are able to do 30 per cent more work for the client. This is a strategy to mine more work from an existing relationship. By this, we are getting a bigger share of the wallet. I cannot say this is going to be the trend." According to him, some local support is needed for high-end technology-oriented companies.

An IIT-Kharagpur graduate who completed his post-graduate diploma in management from IIM, Calcutta, Singh says, "We are not in the same league of call centres operating in the field of credit card processing and the like. We provide high-end technical support for technology companies."

Logging anything between 70 and 100 per cent growth, Slash Support closed last year with a revenue of $25 million According to Singh, the company is targeting a $40-million revenue this year. He says, "We are committed to our 25 customers and we have not lost even one customer ever since we started operations in 1999. "On the other hand, we are mining more orders from the existing clients."

According to him, the San Jose facility will initially have between 25 and 50 people. "It has a capacity for 100 people. We may scale it up based on the need."

Slash Support provides support services in four spheres - consumer technology support, enterprise technology support, enterprise systems management and open source support. The kind of billing depends on the service. While consumer related services are billed on transactions, enterprise support services are billed on a per-engineer basis.

According to Singh, some support calls would take two days to close and in the case of consumer care the resolution could take as long as thirty minutes. This only proves the kind of high-end technology support services offered by it. "The volume of calls may be less but the value it generates for us and the client are high," Singh adds.

The company has positioned itself as a focused player in a niche segment while others are everything for everybody.

The 2,000-headcount company suffers an attrition rate of 30 per cent, which Singh says is lower than the industry average in the BPO space. Providing support services to companies like Alcatel, Slash Support employees pick up additional skill sets that help them in career growth within and outside the company. "We also provide innovative training programmes that help employees to learn new skills and hone what they know," claims Singh.

While 1,500 people are deployed in consumer support services, 500 employees look after the enterprise support function. "Each vertical contributes to the turnover equally. While the deal size in the case of enterprise support may be low vis-a vis consumer support deals, the profitability will be higher in the former.

Even as Slash Support is placed higher in the BPO value chain, it will take the company some time to mature and become a strategic partner for a client by taking over an entire division. "Unlike low end transaction processing services, there is a lot of domain knowledge involved in our activity. Perhaps, we may look at that status a year down the line," responds Singh.

With a short-term plan of touching the $100-million revenue mark, Slash Support is in the process of gaining a foothold in Europe. It has started spending dollars and euros on marketing there. "India will continue to be the hub of our delivery model," he adds.