BPO: The Indian Advantage

NEW DELHI, INDIA: The Indian IT-ITeS industry has shown terrific growth with a CAGR of above 25 percent over the previous 5 years. This has been reflected in both exports of the software and services sector as well as the surge in the domestic market. India has led the growth because of various reasons: abdundance of talent, superior delivery quality, excellent IT infrastructure, IT skill sets, cost advantage, and favorable policy interventions by the government along with other growth-oriented policy moves.

The primary objective of any offshoring unit is to provide ready and flexible capacity with secured, enabled technology infrastructure in order to increase the organizations global operational footprint. The organization gets cost and delivery quality advantage. The IT infrastructure framework are built with tools in such a way to provide an ongoing operational excellance in a secured environment , which is available, flexible , interoperable and provides an extension of the customers secured environment.

The building and execution of these frameworks has been a part of industry learning, based on sharing of the best practices through peer to peer network of CXOs, and the experince of implementing the technology locally.

An organization setting up a new business has to manage facilities and IT infrastructures consistent with its growth imperatives. Each site and facility has to follow approved designed architecture. Excellent relationship with vendor partner becomes very important, as that ensures them providing durable and scable solutions to growing complex scenarios.

It is of course a bottomline in this business that the facility design must be resilient and secured. It should have the capability to scale to the need of the growing business. Each operational areas gets built with resilient IT infratructure and architecture providing security and high availability. The network implementation and application hosting ensures high confidentiality through identity management, and logical and physical profiling of all employees working on the process.

Predominately in these businesses the IT infrastructure has state of art hardware configuration with ability to provide n+1 failproof capabilities. A good industry practice is to have BOQ for the IT infrastructure chosen from proven standards providing virtualization, cross platform integration, complete application managebility through single source, and management and controllership through best in class tools. This would provide the organization flexibility, interoperability, ability to implement virtualization, and identity management fulfilling all the critical objectives of the organization.

The next key success factor is to manage the customer expectation. The success of offshoring was intiated based on wage arbitage but that has been only a first step. Growth of existing processes and new businesses through various successful repeat customers is because expectations have been fulfilled and surpassed. The third dimension of the success factor is regulatory compliance. Many of the large coglomarates, financial institutions, and Fortune 500 companies establishing base in India are global corporations. It is well understood that most offshoring activities have an element of risk for businesses. By aligning the IT design to world class standards, the Indian IT-ITeS sector has ensured that risks are mitigated and the perimeter of the security of their organization is extended to customer operations. Through Risk management, internal and external audits, and by adopting best-in-class IT framework, Indian BPOs and offshoring units have provided an element of trust to their customers along with operational excellance ensuring a complete compliance to regulatory requirements.