A cursory look at the entire outsourcing wave shows how outsourcers have prioritized knowledge and cost savings, and shelved cultural differences. As a result, predominantly western-centric companies, despite the cultural divide, have adapted themselves to Indian dynamics, and that had led the outsourcing industry to boom. In the outsourcing world, BPO is the hottest segment. Unlike its big brother, IT, the dynamics of the BPO industry is totally different. If we look at the two dominant forms of BPO-voice and transaction-companies have come a long way. But, despite that, challenges are very pronounced because BPO is a customer facing industry. On any given day, thousands of BPO employees interact with clients and customers. Whether it is customer queries, tech or customer support, the majority of calls land in India.

So, if we look a little closer at BPO as an enterprise, it faces numerous challenges. And to surmount these challenges, BPO companies need a high degree of top management commitment. Agility comes with the seamless interplay of key components that create an eco-system on which the enterprise runs. If we look at the challenges faced by BPO companies, we can narrow them down to three core challenges-managing the telecom, the IT infrastructure, and HR. If these three components are taken care of, most of the other challenges can be managed easily.

Technology: Challenges and Solutions
The BPO industry is all the while concentrating too much on managing the manpower churn . But correct technology deployments and implementing IT best practices go a long way in upping the operating efficiencies. BPOs, in addition to deploying enterprise applications, give high emphasis to networks as real-time remote communication is the order of the day for most BPOs. Devendra Saharia, co-founder and president, Ajuba Solutions, says, "Managing a private network with diverse network connectivity, PoP is a big challenge for maintaining high uptime. We have recently moved to fully managed services for both voice and data. Data connectivity is managed through an MPLS network and voice access is managed through managed services with end-to-end service level commitments. This helps in managing customer SLA expectations by mapping them to the service providers' SLA commitments".

So, clearly, creating a network up-time backbone that secures the much sought after five-nines (99.999%) up-time is indeed a challenge and the key goal of BPO companies.Thisnetwork backbone is the one that makes the entire mission critical processes in the BPO to function on a 24/7 basis. Reflecting on this, Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian, VP, Technology, Cybernet-SlashSupport (CSS) says, "The challenge in networking is to make sure you have available capacity at all times to enable 24x7 operations. Five nines uptime is not an uncommon requirement. Since there are many factors in networking that are outside of our direct control, this requires constant management of technology and vendor solutions to provide the required level of service. One needs to use the best technology, redundancy in network connectivity and 24x7 monitoring and alerting."

Having realized the criticality of uptime, BPO companies are also gearing up to meet the stringent operational requirements. Take the case of HCL BPO, which has come out with an innovative EnsureIT initiative that guarantees 99.99% uptime of all networks and applications. This helps HCL manage its distributed infrastructure, comprising 9,000 plus employees across eleven geographically spread delivery centers, working on 9,000 plus desktops and phones, and 500 plus servers and network equipment, over a consolidated bandwidth of 300 Mbps spread across varied service providers.

With this initiative, HCL BPO has accrued defined benefits like automated service alerts for utilization and availability of infrastructure components, appropriate underpinnings of organization structure, roles and objectives needed to perform coherently, online reporting and measurement of performance enabling quick decisions at all levels of IT operations leading towards agile service delivery. HCL BPO has also achieved key performance indicators based on best practices in ITIL, which are used to measure and report performance of various levels.

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