One of the biggest fallouts of our success in the software industry has been the creation of another huge opportunity, i.e., IT enabled services. Though somewhat unheralded, the emergence of this industry is only logical. Our success in software export was based on simple value proposition, "World class services at a less than world-class price."

Clearly, this value proposition applies beyond software, to a variety of back office functions such as medical transcription, call centers, legal databases and insurance claims processing. The same competitive pressures that are leading companies to outsource software development are in operation here. Perhaps even more so as many of these functions, is even lesser core to the company. This market is estimated to be over a whopping-trillion dollar in the next few years.

The good news is that in these areas, manpower is far more abundant than software. And this manpower is available not just in the metros. Most of the infrastructure bottlenecks, that such an industry would have faced five years ago, have already been cleaned up as a result of the focus on software exports. The international recognition that we have received in software is going to make it far easier for companies to sell the concept of outsourcing IT enabled services to India from overseas.

There is a very strong opportunity in medical transcription services. However, the last few years have witnessed consolidation in this industry. This is due to increasing maturity and decreasing differentiation between service providers. However, vendors may attempt to provide value differentiation by developing special features within constant cost brackets. The industry also perceives intelligent voice recognition software as a potential concern.

However, in spite of the advances in this technology, it has been difficult for the computer to grasp and analyze the human voice and the English language with all its diversity. There will continue to be a need for skilled medical language specialists who expand their education and have the knowledge to identify and edit the inevitable errors created by speech recognition systems, and who have enough understanding of health records to create an accurate final document. Medical transcriptionists will remain the best qualified to discern the nuances of human speech-indeed, the ultimate speech processors.