Across India, it’s the question that keeps coming up again and again—in conversations, business meetings, conferences, employee settings and even social gatherings. Not a day goes by without the media reporting on BPO successes. Almost everyone has some personal experience to narrate about how BPO is scaling up, changing lives and lifestyles, the increased range of processes being serviced, the number and type of companies being serviced and of course, the ‘friend or relative’ who is now part of the BPO bandwagon. So, where are we headed.

Clearly, India has emerged as the preferred destination in the Global BPO space. Over 60 percent of Fortune 1000 corporations either already outsource to India or are planning to do so in the near future. Their dilemma today is no longer ‘Should we outsource to the neighborhood vs India?’ but more ‘Why haven’t we outsourced to India?’ or even ‘How much should we outsource to India?’

For an industry that began a couple of years ago, it’s very commendable that it already has over 200,000 FTE’s (employees) today. It is expected that this would exceed the one million mark over the next 4 years. Now remember that the next five competing destinations together do not add up to a million.

Over the last five years, advances in technology and telecom have made it possible for people across geographies and time-zones to work together on the same application. You’re but a phone or a click away and with six-sigma high availability. This is an arena where India has taken giant strides. In the BPO clusters, it compares with the best in the world—abundant inter-continental bandwidth through five submarine cables, choice of service providers and soon end-to-end managed services.

Connectivity has resulted in access to newer talent pools. It’s an area of specific strength for India—in terms of the workforce numbers, their skill levels and cost effectiveness. India thus has the advantage of participating across a wider spectrum of outsourced BPO services than it’s competitors.

Till recently, India had a ready talent pool in waiting and that serviced the first wave of BPO growth. This was supported by the heartening trend of increased migration of talent at the middle- and senior-management level from various sectors like hotel management, IT and financial services to the BPO space. The bigger opportunity of tomorrow, however, requires more steps to be taken to enhance the existing education infrastructure.

The incremental numbers are indeed daunting—900,000 associates, 20000 entry-level managers, 5000 middle-level managers, 1000 senior managers! Also support functions and enabling infrastructure manpower. Plugging the gap is crucial for India to consolidate its attempt for becoming the center for global BPO operations. The good news is that India seems to have recognized the challenge and is off the blocks. Several government and private sector initiatives are already in the works to tackle this potential bottleneck.

The third factor—proven process and quality frameworks, execution excellence and consistency of service is perhaps India’s secret recipe. The global delivery of services model has been pioneered and evolved by leveraging India’s technology resources and is being taken to the next level by the Global BPO players—who need to deliver quality, customer experience and service consistency real time, second after second. What helps is India’s culture to innovate and adapt faster then others as far as technology possibilities are concerned. ‘Serviced from India’ is clearly gaining recognition by the day.

The competitive advantages that India offers coupled with the recognition that India is the leading front for evolutionary changes in the BPO industry, has ensured that the largest third-party BPO services providers now have major centers located in India. Also, increasingly, it is considered desirable for strategic and senior management to have an India experience to prepare for the BPO market space of tomorrow. This applies to captives also (GE, HSBC) where the core BPO talent pool now is India-centric.

India is clearly at the forefront and has the potential to go places. But let us not kid ourselves. While, we’re at the start of something big, there is a long journey ahead to becoming ‘the nerve center’ of the BPO world. The basics are in place. The potential is there. But only time will tell if India does realize it or fritters away the opportunity.

Either way, it’s exciting times ahead!