Flat World

Not being involved with any outsourcing business, I experience the flatness of the world through online communities, media streaming, file and information sharing, e-mails and chatting, etc. Through social networking websites like Friendster, I can stay in touch with my distant friends and relatives. Instead of going to a mall, I can actually stay at home and shop online from anywhere around the world. And as a student who is usually bombarded with a lot of research work, I rely on search engines like Google and Yahoo, and on online encyclopedias, dictionaries and news articles. I don’t need to buy books or go through the hassle of searching books in a library and checking them out one by one for information and pictures anymore. Likewise, I don’t need to buy audio or video CD’s because I can download songs through LimeWire or watch a movie in YouTube. I can do all these things, yet all I need to pay for is my PLDT DSL connection and the only place I need to go to is in front of my computer.

The rapid changes in technology have made my life more comfortable. Compared to the people who lived a century before me, I can do more things with less effort exerted and less

money spent. I am indeed empowered as an individual through the internet. The things that only professionals and rich people can do or obtain before, anyone like me can do or obtain as well today. And as long as I have an internet access, I can never be too far from the other side of the globe, just like the call center employees Thomas Friedman talked about in his book, The World is Flat, thanks to the new technology brought to the Philippines.

Philippines is not a dominant player in what Friedman calls a flat world, but it is fast catching up. In recent years, it has become the destination of choice for outsourcing due to the large pool of trainable and highly skilled English-speaking labor force it offers, as well as the reduced cost of operations. Sykes Enterprises, Convergys Corp., Accenture, eTelecare, Caltex, Procter & Gamble, Barnes and Noble and American OnLine (AOL), among others, have built service centers in the Philippines . According to the Department of Trade and Industry, the revenue generated by the Philippine outsourcing industry grew from $3.5 billion in 2006 to $5 billion in 2007, and the outsourcing sector employees increased from 235,000 in 2006 to 320,000 in 2007 . This growth spurt has been fueled not only by call center outsourcing, which forms the largest part of the sector, but also by outsourcing intellectually based activities like research, web development, software development, multimedia production, medical transcription, logistics, accounting and legal work. Transmedic Outsourcing Philippines, Inc., for example, provides regulatory affairs, quality assurance and technical services, clinical and medical consultancy to the pharmaceutical industry . Flipside Game Studios, Inc., on the other hand, specializes in full-scale development and outsourcing services for the game industry . StickyMedia Solutions offer professional internet solutions including web design and development, content writing, programming, public relations and advertising . These are some of the Philippine-based companies providing outsourcing services.

The outsourcing business in the Philippines is very promising, but Philippines still has to contend with other Asian countries. Consultancy A.T. Kearney, in its 2006 ranking of the most desirable global services locations which are competitive for business process outsourcing, ranked the Philippines fourth in the world behind India, China, and Malaysia . India does charge lower than the Philippines—for data encoding work, India charges around $4 versus $6 in the Philippines —and its outsourcing sector employs a total of 750,000 in 2006, which is way higher than that of the Philippines . China's proximity to Japan and South Korea as well as its common culture and similar language, on the other hand, make it a better offshore outsourcing destination to those two large economies . And to combat competition from the Philippines, Malaysia is positioning itself as a high-value rather than low-cost destination for voice services .

The outsourcing market in Asia Pacific grew substantially in 2007. Although the number of contracts signed in 2007 grew by just over four per cent, their total contract value increased 30 per cent year over