Search Results

On Saturday night, Sept. 24, an undersea cable connecting Karachi, Pakistan, and Mumbai, India, to the West failed around 10:27 p.m. local time in Pakistan. The cable fault blocked 75 percent of Pakistan's Internet connectivity to the outside world and some voice traffic as well ...

Do you plan to conduct business abroad? If yes, then you need to know how you may be seen by others. Otherwise failure can result. The globalization of supply chains and support services means that you don't need to travel to engage in business internationally, but that lack of face-to-face interaction only makes communication that much more critical...

How big of a problem is spam? The 2004 National Technology Readiness Survey estimated that spam costs the United States economy US$21.58 billion per year in lost productivity ...

Ah, e-mail, the lifeblood for millions of businesses across the globe. What would we do without it? ...

Without access to e-mail, many of us would cease to function. If you use e-mail regularly, there is a 100 percent chance that some of the e-mails you send or receive will be blocked. If such e-mails are not important to you, then you might not notice. However, if those e-mails are important, then inconvenience or anguish might result ...

American relations with China may be seen from both a political perspective and in regard to how U.S. firms are seeking to enter the Chinese market. We begin here with the political perspective and then examine strategies for U.S. firms seeking to enter Chinese markets ...

Indian call center agents and software developers are assuming important roles in Western economies. As a consequence, labor markets in India are becoming a key strategic variable for many Western firms ...

This has been a bad couple weeks for your country, Pakistan. Every day brings more bad news. The worst indication is the drop in confidence among broad segments of the business community in Pakistan earlier this month, particularly the tech sector, which has been growing at over 50 percent per year and represents one of your strongest bases of support...

Service has been restored on a damaged telecommunications cable that links India and Pakistan to the West, but not before the international service outage caused widespread financial damage, most especially to the cell center industry ...

Damage to the undersea telecommunications cable SEA-ME-WE3 (SMW3) Monday initially disrupted most of Pakistan's international telephone and Internet connections, but the outage spread to India, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Djibouti as repairs were started yesterday ...

Challenges facing new offshore call centers can spill over and impact clients and customers of those clients. Driven by cost considerations and the availability of personnel, U.S. firms are increasingly turning to offshore call centers -- but are often doing so without fully understanding the constraints facing those facilities ...

A new call center just opened in Navi Mumbai, India. It won't be making the headlines for being a new monster facility with impressive clients and well-known managers. But this modest business, Purple Support Services, has more to teach us about call center operations and IT outsourcing than any other center that has opened recently ...

Americans who make it to Pakistan find an altogether different world than the one they had expected, as Anthony Mitchell of InternationalStaff.net, a regular columnist for the E-Commerce Times, found out this February When it comes to Pakistan, the image belies the reality, an...

Do you have a startup that never made it off the ground? What happened? ...

Are you considering outsourcing a customer support or software development project? Here are some practical tips, oriented towards South Asian facilities but relevant to North American outsourcing providers ...

New information technology outsourcing opportunities are largely going to India, thanks to India's long-standing advantages. Despite negative press coverage that India has received for problems at a few outsourcing facilities, India is set to maintain its lead as the high-tech outsourcing destination of choice for U.S. clients ...

Has India's information technology (IT) outsourcing boom peaked? There have been predictions that India will lose most of its outsourcing firms in the next two years. IT industry wages in India reportedly rose an average of 12 percent in 2004 and are projected to increase by another 15 percent in 2005 ...

Police in India announced on Thursday that they had recovered 1 million Indian Rupees (almost US$23,000) in funds allegedly stolen from Citibank customers in the U.S. by employees of an Indian call center firm ...

Business process outsourcing (BPO) facilities, which handle non-voicework, are easier to manage than offshore call centers. This is because of the nature of the work itself as well as the human resource issues associated with call centers in emerging economies ...

There are four lessons for U.S. firms setting up operations offshore, beginning with the need for good market positioning, having enough American trainers on the ground, emphasizing quality over quantity, and the need to export American corporate culture overseas rather than have offshore facilities adapt to local workplace culture ...