Unified OSS vs best of breed

For over a decade, outsourcing to India has provided Western companies with a means to cut service development and maintenance costs, deal effectively with the peaks and valleys of demand and focus their own efforts on more strategic work. Both India’s government and entrepreneurs were quick to take advantage of this growing trend, attracting multi-national after multi-national to outsource their business services. According to Nasscom, Indian ICT and business outsourcing services last year employed four million people and accounted for 7% of India’s gross domestic product.

 

However, the extent of outsourcing in India is likely to decline over the coming years. The cost advantage used to be at least a 1:6 return, but this has now dropped to less than 1:3. The demand for workers in the ICT services industry has now outstripped the supply of labor to such an extent that a worker shortage is being created, driving up wages and pushing western companies to outsource to Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Technology commentators have also pointed out that low value-added and easily automatable work should disappear over the course of the next decade. This has led some industry analysts to claim that India is facing an economic backlash, as western companies take their business elsewhere.

 

If India is to continue to thrive economically in the 21^st century, it will need to diversify into developing its own products and services, rather than simply acting as a support for others. To this end, Indian companies will need to create a stable and advanced communications infrastructure to support their growing highly skilled workforce with experience spanning IT, finance and telecoms. Fortunately, this is a path India has already started down.

 

The Indian telecom market presents substantially different requirements to those in western Europe or North America. They are also extremely lucrative, with OSS Observer forecasting revenue growth in emerging markets at 11% from 2007-2012. Even so, the development of India’s communications infrastructure will be a long and difficult process. Indian telecom companies face the enormous logistical challenge of a rugged landscape covering over three million square kilometers and a huge, largely rural population. The key will be in accessing their large and often rural populations. Some 70% of India’s 1.1 billion people live in rural areas with tele-density of around 2%.

 

While the opportunity for customer growth is clear, the automation and intelligent management of manual activities to generate operational efficiency will be critically important when maintaining services for such a large volume of subscribers spread across a huge area. One Indian operator is currently supporting a 1:1750 staff to subscriber ratio.