On the sunny afternoon of 13 April 1998, the world’s largest telecom and network service provider AT&T experienced a major glitch in its frame relay network. Barring all services to its customers, the company’s network came to a standstill, unable to fix the jinx for two days. Many days have passed since that unfortunate one, but still the scourge of network slippage haunts customers worldwide. Big companies in India have also gone berserk, unable to handle their downed networks. What was once considered to be core area has now taken a back seat to security, but how important is network?

Some are maintaining an in-house network to avoid any mishaps, which in turn handicaps its customer relation. Transwork is one such network dependant BPO firm connected across its U.S-Bangalore-Mumbai facilities on a single in-house maintained network. With most of the BPO companies setting up critical networking equipment outside India for better bandwidth utilization, Transworks is operating its own locally. CTO Namasivayam Gajapathy explains how times have quickly changed in networking industry. People who once thought handling a network was easier from America—for global connectivity—are realizing the heat of cost of operation (cop). “Today, the bandwidth that is available in India is comparably the best in the world. With the ongoing slash to telecom rates, there is surely an advantage in the cost of operation and maintenance of critical equipments from India,” he says.

While the BPO companies are more network-concerned, so are other players in the financial, banking and software sectors. Outsourcing technology is lately a common feature among banks, like ING Vysya Bank that outsourced its technology to iGate. Because its customers are not concerned with the bank’s networking infrastructure like that of the BPO’s, there is no immediate effect on the bank’s work processes. However, both the sectors currently have stringent service level agreements (SLAs) from their vendors entailing everything from routers to modems, and Internet service providers to security providers. Cisco, for example, is a widely accepted company when it comes to products like router and IP products as well as LAN and WAN operations. However, companies in the BPO space are more accustomed to use the voice specific component vendors like Avia and Nortel for those operations.

Most of the BPOs maintaining their critical equipment elsewhere from their work place are leading to big loss of support from the channel partners, say the CIOs. According to them, today channel partners in India are bringing in the best services on par with the global standards. JNS Ramanath, Assistant VP of IT, INGVysya Bank, agrees, “we choose a product or service through an extensive study conducted in-house and run a pilot project with the support of our channel partners.” Although channel partners are doing an excellent work in India, for Transworks, support level services from the vendor needs to take a major image shape-up. “We are a 24/7/365 company, so availability of support around the clock will be a boon to us,” says Gajapathy. Technology is also so fast-paced that channel partners are lagging behind in updating clients on evolving technologies- a common fray among the companies and vendors.

Newer technologies are currently the prime concern among most companies. With its growing speed, companies are finding it difficult to process. Not only the implementation cost, but also issues like experimenting them with mission critical network. For example, if a new operating system is launched it’s intimidating for any company to shift its operating system from the existing one to the other. “You will not know which one works how and there is always a possibility of network going down,” says Gajapathy. For a banking company these concerns are barely intimidating, maybe because of the non-mission critical work executed. However, some of them follow a yearly upgrading process to keep pace to service customers and employees across their branches. “The downing of a network can be equally harmful to a bank’s health, but not as immediately as of a call-center,” says Ramanath.

Network slippage is very uncommon among bigger companies. Most of the ISPs provide different levels of redundancy to keep the networks running even in the worst situations. ING Vysya currently has different levels of redundancy offered by its service provider VSNL. Not only do they check the network but also carry a network performance audit along with third party auditing. “Third party auditors like Wipro conduct auditing on a regular basis,” says Ramanath. Added to many company and third party auditing, clients also quarterly audit their customer’s network for BPOs. Transwork is one such company that opts to open its network for client assessment. Its networks have various redundancies to avoid network slippage, claims the CTO. Transworks’ network is built on multiple lease lines with multiple paths, as are most of the BPO companies worldwide. If one lease line goes down an automatic switch occurs to another.

If maintaining redundancy is one aspect, another is to introduce security and proper functional capacity of the existing equipment. In order to achieve this, companies have installed different security software, firewall and IDS, and also monitor the health of these equipments every quarter.

One of the most frequent complaints in the BPO industry is the interoperability of their networking equipments. Despite using equipments by the same vendors, it is possible there is no interoperability among equipment with varying versions. These problems sometimes go unanswered as the vendors develop new products, regarding the previous ones as obsolete.