Talisma hives off one division

Bangalore: Talisma Corporation has decided to transfer all its outsourcing assets to B2K Corporation for business growth. Oak Investment Partners, the majority stakeholder in Talisma, will hold a strategic stake in B2K.

Talisma's outsourced services division was established in 1994 to provide remote technical support and customer service from Bangalore. The division had been serving a global client base, including organisations such as Real Networks, Microsoft and i2, from an integrated contact centre in Bangalore that supports voice, email and interactive chat.

The city-based B2K is led by Vivek Kulkarni, chairman and CEO. Kulkarni was the IT secretary of the Karnataka government. B2K will focus on providing contact centre and business process outsourcing (BPO) services for companies in hi-tech, healthcare and telecom verticals.

Says Talisma CEO Dan Vetras: "With our recent announcement to merge with Pivotal Corporation, USA, we want to focus our management team and resources on growing our software business. The partnership with B2K will ensure that we continue to provide our customers very compelling outsourced service offerings without having to manage that part of the business directly."

"Talisma has a well-established foundation in the outsourced service business and we are well positioned and well capitalised to accelerate the growth of this operation. Unlike a traditional outsourcing vendor, B2K delivers business insights and value to its customers using sophisticated business analytics. B2K holds certain intellectual property in the area of customer relationship management [CRM] analytics using fuzzy logic, email analyser and portfolio optimiser. We will also derive significant advantage from the strength of the combined Talisma-Pivotal CRM solution that will be available to us to provide service offerings such as outsourced analytics and outsourced campaigns," states Kulkarni.