Sunanda Das is Managing Director, Cable&Wireless Europe, Asia & US (EAUS) in India. His responsibilities include overseeing the development of the company’s business to India and the South Asia market. He joined Cable&Wireless, India in 1998 as Chief Financial Officer before being appointed to the position of Managing Director a year later. Under Sunanda’s stewardship, Cable&Wireless has gained a strong foothold in the Indian market, where he led the go-to-market strategy, aligning the sales, operations and management of Cable&Wireless business in the region. Sunanda began his career with The Associated Cement Companies Limited (ACC) before moving on to Essar Steel Limited in 1996. He graduated in Commerce from St Xaviers College, Calcutta in 1987. He became a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India in 1988 and the Institute of Cost & Works Accountants of India in 1989. should still be accessible from any remote computer. 

ValueNotes: the current economic downturn has impacted several businesses - do you see an increase or decrease in outsourcing?  
Sunanda: The current economic crisis has battered the financial sector and moved on to the real estate sector of the economy resulting in a total freeze of credit markets, significant downturn in corporate profitability, loss of confidence in business prospects and tapering of consumer spending. While we have reached a crucial juncture in our economic history, suppliers as a whole will become increasingly more creative in illustrating profitable business models that demonstrate value creation for customers. Innovative new value propositions for outsourcing will emerge.

Outsourcing expenditures will continue to rise as customers are looking for business process excellence, speed to market, improvement in quality, and benchmarking to world-class standards. Suppliers understand that they must compete globally and that outsourcing will play a more transformational and strategic role for the client. Driven by the imperative to offset slower growth in the US and Europe, US multinationals will continue investing and growing their operations in India, seeking newer markets to sell in.

ValueNotes: What are the challenges that you encounter while offshoring?  
Sunanda: Despite the increase in the number of highly skilled workers in China, India, and other countries, serious educational constraints - high illiteracy rates, the lack of language proficiency, inadequate higher education - could easily dampen growth and reduce the attractiveness of certain offshore locations. Also, an increase in the demand for IT skills is driving up pay levels.

Organizations need to bear in mind certain crucial factors before offshoring, such as local employment law, costs of hiring and firing and the procedures prospective vendors follow to screen potential employees, including background checks and references. They also need to ensure that the prospective project leaders have the requisite project management skills and ability to lead a team.

ValueNotes: What are the key factors that you would consider while choosing a service provider?
Sunanda: While most companies have long understood the importance of maintaining their IT infrastructure, proactive investment for security and business continuity measures have lagged behind due to the complexity of measuring real value versus sensible cost. Some other key factors to bear in mind include: n True Flexibility: Every business has unique data needs. It is important to partner with a vendor who will work closely to customize a flexible solution with a fixed monthly cost that fits your budget. Scalable services that will grow with you are essential to the growth and success of your business.

•   Complete Security: It is essential that the data center delivers the highest levels of security, performance and availability.
•   Performance Reliability: The strength of your provider’s infrastructure and support systems guarantees that your server and network will operate uninterrupted. With remote server management, you should expect your next-generation network or Multi Service Platform (MSP) to respond quickly and efficiently to problems through email or voice mail. In the event of a business disruption, your servers, applications, email and website  
•   Guaranteed Compliance: Check the vendor’s compliance component to make sure it satisfies all industry and governmental regulations and is an integral part of your solution. A managed service should be seamlessly monitored and administered.   

ValueNotes: What are the key trends in offshoring with respect to the telecom industry? How do you see this changing over the next couple of years?  
Sunanda: As the outsourcing of network operations, maintenance and installation becomes widespread in the telecom sector as a way to reduce costs while enhancing service quality, so will the outsourcing of new customer account processing, account management, customer service, billing and other important but non-core business processes to third-party services providers based in offshore locations like India and China. Enterprises have become more conscious of their spending on IT and telecom solutions, but we see a bigger opportunity as companies are looking at network consolidation. Multiple IT services, resilient networks and the use of MPLS help costs come down.  

ValueNotes: According to you, are there any specific services/processes that will see significant growth in outsourcing? Why?  
Sunanda: Compared to the previous meltdown in 2001, the current crisis has affected many sectors - mainly financial services, manufacturing and automotive - and is expected to have a far reaching impact on the exportdriven Indian IT sector. One of the biggest areas that is seeing growth today is healthcare outsourcing and this will continue to grow through 2009. Sectors such as media, retail, utilities and telecom are all increasing their outsourcing activity amidst the current economic downturn as they face pressures to cut costs. Within the telecom sector, business processes such as customer care and other back-office functions will be outsourced, along with billing and support and training services.

ValueNotes: How do you think the downturn will impact the BPo industry?  
Sunanda: While the recession has definitely had an adverse impact on the IT and BPO sector, there is reason to believe that the BPO sector will keep on booming as it is an essential service. To sustain profits, companies are moving more work offshore, and converting time and material projects into fixed price projects, while freezing wage hikes and recruitments. While most BPOs have felt an impact on their prices and have even lost some clients, on the whole, business flow has remained stable. In order for it to continue, BPOs will have to increase their focus on a number of areas including productivity, efficiency, and resource utilization, wage modernisation and optimal lateral hiring.