Session-I
Chris Stewart, EVP, Zenta: We have been seeing challenges particularly in voice, and using technology is going to differentiate us from our competitors. For us to deliver high levels of performance, I need to understand exactly what is happening with my agents. How do we manage that? We need business intelligence to drive us. For instance, when is the best time to call? Forecasting is another important tool.

Paresh Shah, MD, Convergys: Technology certainly is exploited in all dimensions. We take advantage of it as well, be it in process optimization, standardization to increase the bottomline or to improve workforce productivity to benefit customers or clients. This essentially creates a significant differentiation for a company.

Mohit Jain, chief innovation officer, 24/7 Customer: At innovations lab, we are essentially creating new products and new services for our clients as well as prospects, using three core competencies. One is technology, the second is business intelligence, and the third is process engineering. If you have a good mix of these three core competencies, you also have the ability to create new services, which currently don't exist anywhere in the market.

Rahul Kanodia, VC & MD, Datamatics Technologies: Today, what is happening is that customers are increasingly seeing you as a third-party vendor who services several global companies. Somebody who will introduce their organization to best practices. They are expecting you to transform their businesses and to give them a platform on which they can compete and, therefore, the expectation from a third party vendor is increasing.

Rajeev Shroff, head, Avaya Global Support Center: There is a lot of focus on infusing technology for improving productivity. There is a balance required in terms of using technology and what the experience is for the end-user.

Industry Presentation
Gautam Roy, business manager, Checkpoint: Security being one of the problem areas for all BPOs, clients are actually going to give you much more critical information and more critical processes if they see that their information is secure.

Confidentiality, integration, and availability are key issues that we typically look at when we talk about information security. Information security is actually a combination of three P's (people, process technology, and product). So, all of them put together give you a true sense of security.

Session II: Industry Presentation

Prakash Iyer, group product manager, Tata Indicom Enterprise Business Unit: Some challenges faced by contact centers everyday are: high tariff costs, the large initial tax outlay that went into it, and the very high maintenance cost of premises-based technology. Hosted contact center solutions answer some of these issues.

Panel
Rajiv Gerela, VP-IT, Deutche Bank: Security is needed for products right from laptop/desktop to the end server-everything has to become secure. The second aspect which technology really can't address is the people. And that is where internal discipline, a little bit of education, will actually help us.

Vaibhav Patkar, CSO, Zenta: So the challenge of being a security officer has gone much bigger as compared to what it was earlier. I give the most priority to securing the data of my clients. The security awareness session really helps bring out the culture in the system but if the senior management is not following that it is of no use.

Rajnish Sarna, director, Effort BPO: Now that data has become of great value it has become very important that companies secure their organization, so there is no doubt about the fact that companies are doing business in the BPO space have to secure their organizations.

Gautam Dua, business manager, Checkpoint: Security's biggest concern is on the network front. Second, is the physical aspect. Security is like a chain, you know even if you have strengthened one area, the weakest link is still there. This is probably at the desktop level. Your IT administrator is like a police, is he doing the right job?

SESSION III: Panel
Anwer Bagdadi, CIO, CFC International: The biggest and most important challenge always remains technology. And from a technology perspective, we have to keep on plugging in new capital equipment like servers and connectivity. The key to this is that you must have a framework that cannot be replicated, is scalable, and provides security to your business to work because your business can only grow if it can build trust with the customer. Secondly, it must be IT enabled and integrated. Third, the infrastructure should be available because all of us work on a global scale.

Sunil Kankal, CTO, Silgate Solutions: As far as the challenges are concerned, we are going to credit the growth with reference to technology. What we have seen is that the business demands too many things and that is at the click of a key-plug-and-play. We also must have SLAs signed with our internal customers and ensure that they understand the terms of the SLAs.

Prakash Iyer, group product manager, TIEBU: From a technology angle, I would just like to say that today there are two key factors in the technology space which service providers have adopted, which enables them to scale in a much easier fashion. The first one is the arrival of what we call 'Managed or Hosted Services' and the second one is the concept of virtualization.