Kannan says his clients may want to create more helpful self-service web sites for their customers, something more like the consumer technology they interact with daily (Google, iPhones, etc.) But, says Kannan, "that's the worst job CIOs have today, matching (consumer technology) expectations. The may build a system like that, but Google and Apple are already building something fundamentally different that will come out in the next couple of years."

Moving out of big city centers to tier-2 and tier-3 cities in India and elsewhere:

"It's not a stupid idea," says Kannan, but 24/7 Customer is staying away from less developed cities. It's firmly entrenched in city centers in Bangalore, Chennai, New Delhi, and Hyderabad. In Guatemala, 24/7 set up shop in downtown Guatemala City. In the Philippines, "We're in the heart of Manila and would not step out of that."

"The infrastructure in Tier 1 cities is in no way comparable to first world countries and China is way ahead of that," says Kannan. "It's taken the last five years to get reliable bandwidth in tier 1 cities. In tier 2 cities, those issues get compounded. And there's the coordination costs of managing multiple locations."

The complications of Latin America:

For IT and BPO providers, Latin America can be a tough nut to crack, with so many smaller countries, slightly different cultures and language, and varying systems standards. So how do you succeed?

"Dumb luck," says Kannan, who opened up a center in Guatemala a year ago. "You can wake up one day and find the country you're operating in decided to move away from democracy to something else."

That's the trade-off with low-cost locations, he says. "If they had better standards of living, great infrastructure, and perfect democracies, they would cost as much as the first world."

Operations in China:

24/7 Customer is doing some work in China to handle calls in Mandarin. Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean. Driven in part by its U.S.-based customers with Asian operations, 24/7 Customer is "very serious about understanding China. China in long run will be a big market for us."

But, he admits: "You go there and get drawn in, but as a businessman, you don't really know how to make money there."

English as the Microsoft Windows of the world:

If China is going to be such a major force, I asked Kannan, should we all learn Mandarin? I got an unequivocal "no."

"English is the Microsoft operating system of languages," says Kannan. "It's ugly, but it's global. You live with it the way you live with Microsoft Word." Kannan predicts that within ten years, everyone in China will be speaking English, thanks to some very ambitious programs there. They see the benefits India's gotten from the language. (Though, he notes, English was largely forced on India by British colonial rule.)