It's not just HR and the backlash… lower reliability of international connectivity could sour the Destination India outsourcing story
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
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Today India, more than any other place in the world, is on the verge of
something big. With the global trend for business process outsourcing taking on
steam, an economic juggernaut is nudging us towards tech superpower status.
It is only from the infrastructure standpoint that this beautiful dream may
be kept from turning into reality. It is becoming abundantly clear that India
needs to gear up its ability to meet the world-class communications demands of
the emerging BPO sector in order to become the outsourcing capital of the world.
Therein lies the key concern international connectivity into India, the
mainstay of global communications. This not only forms the backbone of the
technological viability of moving business processes to overseas locations, but
is one of the highest cost components of an outsourcing project.
Maintaining the Edge
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To
position itself as the outsourcing capital of the world India must
strengthen infrastructure. This will effectively nullify the
advantage that destinations like the Philippines currently enjoy
n
Individual BPO firms
will not need to inject international cable diversity into their
network design to the extent that they currently do. They should
benefit from self-healing features in SDH-enabled rings in cables
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A new cable system with
self-healing capabilities will release additional bandwidth to the
BPO market. BPO operators will no longer need to keep spare
bandwidth as part of their DR plans
All these will alter the cost equation of BPO projects
As outsourcing companies evaluate India and compare it against competing
countries like the Philippines and China, one issue that stands out is the cost
and reliability of international cable systems that land on Indian shores.
Today, India has cable systems like SEA ME WE II/III, Flag and I2I.
While cable connectivity provides the lowest latency amongst all transmission
media (like satellite) available today, these are prone to cable cuts and
outages that can result from a variety of reasons including damage caused in the
physical cable systems on oceanic routes. Restoration of services, therefore,
becomes a critical issue. We need sophisticated cable systems that have built-in
architecture that involve self-healing rings that are are SDH-enabled and can
auto-restore communications links in milli-seconds.
Yet the cables that currently land in India are linear threads and do not
have such self-healing features. The result is that BPOs are forced to design
their own networks in a manner that maximizes cable diversity. Simply put, in
case a specific cable is
impacted, BPO firms are able to keep their business going using other circuits,
which may be alternate cable systems. While this backup method works, it also
increases the overall telecom cost. So, BPO firms are forced to over-engineer
their network so that adequate bandwidth is available.
The lack of self-healing cable systems leads to higher network costs and
lowers the level of confidence in India’s telecom infrastructure. This can
have a decisive impact on the ‘Destination India’ story—especially as
other countries turn on the heat on the BPO front. New cable systems take time
to deploy and are high-value projects. To add to the travails, revenue
realization from these comes over the lifetime of the cable.
Additional cable capacity must become available while demand is still growing
so that the supply released is met with adequate demand. A look at the brighter
side—whichever telecom company provides a self-healing telecom backbone will
reap rewards aplenty, apart from being instrumental in giving a jet-thrust to
the great Indian outsourcing rush.
Rohit Arora is Country General Manager,
Indian Subcontinent, Asia Netcom
