The Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@sha) has asked the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom to immediately redesign service level agreements for acquiring bandwidth capacity in post-telecom deregulation scenario. This was stated by the P@sha President Jehan Ara while speaking at a press briefing on Wednesday.
She said that the new agreements should be included with a clause of compensation to protect the infant call centers and business process outsourcing (BPO) sector in the country.
Due to breakdown in country's only submarine link SEA-ME-WE-3 for 11 days has diverted some United States-based outsourcing business to other destinations.
Presently, in post-telecom deregulation scenario, everyone is free to negotiate with any service provider but unfortunately, the Long Distance and International (LDI) companies were still unable to provide data transfer facilities as the licences have the provision to give the facility of Data Network Operators (DNOPs).
Due to Internet breakdown catastrophe, the local companies dealing in IT-enabled services (ITeS), software houses, call centres and Internet service providers (ISPs) using bandwidth capacity were unable to fulfil their commitment to local and international outsourcing clients.
Now, some of foreign outsourcing clients demanded and are seeking compensation from local companies.
Jehan Ara said the association members met in Karachi to discuss the full impact of the Internet outage that took place from June 27 to July 8, due to the damage to the Internet link and to discuss the future measures for business continuity and recovery. During the lengthy session the call centers, BPO companies and software service companies reiterated that the measures presently in place were inadequate to cope with the international requirements of outsourcing.
"It could result in the total wipe out of ITeS industry if such an incident were allowed to happen again," she pointed out.
Jehan Ara said the larger companies within the folds of P@sha, who had their own redundant infrastructures in place were able to operate almost seamlessly with over 85 percent of their installed capacity.
Those members, who were totally reliant on the limited satellite backup provided by the IT ministry, were able to conduct only a fraction of their business. The association members hoped that this would serve as a real eye-opener for the policy makers, she said, adding that the vigilant member companies were able to maintain decent service levels even in this severe outage by resorting to routing their work flows to disaster recovery centres around the globe.
Some members even reported that they flew their personnel to Dubai, Hong Kong and other locations in Asia to ensure continuity of service to their important customers.
A working group was created within P@sha to address the unique requirements of the lTeS sector especially the call centers and the BP0s.
Jehan Ara suggested provisioning of two-way V-Sat connectivity to all P@sha and Pakistan Software Export Board, ITeS companies including ISPs and LDI operators.
The IT ministry and Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) should communicate the exact rollout and commissioning dates for the SEAMEWE-4 and the land links to Amritsar and Iran.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) should maintain a minimum level of service for data providers including redundancy and redesign Service Level Agreements (SLA) building in downtime compensation which is at the moment very vague.
A monitoring committee of P@sha and PASEB members should be formed to work on critical infrastructure elements like Pakistan Internet Exchange, fibre optic landing points and city hubs of bandwidth.