Chennai is the star city of South India with competitive business environment, operating cost advantages, scalability, quality real estate, telecom connectivity, urban infrastructure, city governance and skilled professionals to deliver quality output.

The city is India’s second-largest exporter of software, IT and related services and contributes 39 percent of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu’s GDP. The major ITO providers in the city are TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, HCL, Mahindra Satyam, IBM, Accenture, Polaris, L&T InfoTech, PerotSystem and Vertusa.

Reputed educational institutions such as IIT, Regional Engineering College, Anna University, Bharathiyar University in Chennai account for 51 percent of the total computer and engineering graduates in the country. Tamil Nadu has 22 universities, 250 engineering colleges, 207 polytechnics and 526 IT institutes. The state churns out 75,000 engineering graduates per year including more than 35,000 IT specialists. With 45,000 professional, the state also has the largest number of IT professionals. This is primarily the reason behind the city’s young English-speaking talent pool—which is an added advantage for the BPO industry.

The BPO providers ruling the city are Office Tiger (now part of RR Donnelley), TCS, 24X7 Customer, HCL BPO, KPMG, Wipro BPO to name a few.

The labor cost is significantly cheaper as compared to any U.S. cities. The monthly salary of an entry-level techie in Chennai is $280 to $300 and for an entry-level BPO executive is $200 to $220. In addition, the city is much more cost efficient than any other Indian outsourcing city. It offers best infrastructure among the South India cities and has a low cost of living and rapidly developing infrastructure. Its closeness to the airport is a geographical advantage, which a client might consider while outsourcing its BPO projects.

As any other outsourcing city, Chennai specializes in some specific outsourcing services. It has an established center of excellence for product development, ADM, testing, engineering services, business analytics, and legal services. It is also an emerging destination for R&D.

Companies such as Lason, Ajuba Solutions (India), Apollo Health Street, iHealthcare, Paramount Healthcare, and Hinduja TMT in the city signify the opportunity for healthcare IT firms. The expansion of healthcare services provided would include ADM services to maintain electronic medical records, hospital-management systems, systems for capture of medical billing and coding, transcription related domain expertise, medical insurance and payment related expertise, and many more.

The captives in the city are Citi, Caterpillar, CB Richards Ellis, Maersk, Deloitte, L&T Engg, Philips, Red Hat, Siemens, Texas Instruments. Chennai has grown significantly over the past decade along with the government initiatives through IT / IT-enabled services state policies (2008) incentives.

However, the hot and humid climatic conditions in the city are still a black mark to some extent which might influence a minor percentage of employees to leave the city.