I was impressed by the fact that the several Cairo-based outsourcers I visited had fantastic physical infrastructure. It almost doesn't matter what the rest of the country has available - they've managed to assure Microsoft and Oracle and other companies of stature that the lights will stay on and the data centers will stay secure. So far so good.

In an age where my laptop has its own phone number and I can call for free from Cairo to New York, talk to my kids while listening to the Met game via Internet radio, we should take for granted that the lights will stay on. If the Egyptian national infrastructure couldn't manage that much, they wouldn't be hosting said conference, let alone vying for a role on the world stage as a call center locale.

When I first started covering the call center industry in the early 1990s, site selection was a very different animal. In those days, the core of the industry was focused on the American midwest. The college towns were filled with young transient workers with flat, non-regional accents. The outsourcing companies had set up shop years before in the regions around Omaha, Nebraska; Davenport & Sioux City, Iowa; various small cities in South Dakota, to name just a few places. One of the key reasons for the clustering was the availability of good technical infrastructure in those places. Military bases and AT&T points of presence provided the engines for large scale telecom operations to hop onto the network and do outbound telemarketing and inbound service. It was a golden age.

And then other areas of the US started to take notice. Economic development officials began to wonder why they couldn't plop several hundred jobs down in their town by offering the right incentives, the right tax breaks, the right piece of real estate with a cushy deal from the local telco. And so the competition to be low cost provider within the US began in earnest... Oklahoma, Kansas, Wyoming, North Carolina, lots of locations in the southwest and south put together packages to attract call center investment. And the industry began its inexorable crawl across American to inhabit towns and cities large and small by the end of the last decade. Why is it important or even noteworthy? Because the lesson that I learned watching it happen was this: once you get to a certain baseline level of infrastructure, it stops being a topic for consideration in terms of site selection. In 1992 we learned that You can build a call-center-class industrial park and plop it down just about anywhere in America.

The same phenomenon is at work worldwide now. So, it was very enlightening to sit down with Egypt's minister of Communications and IT and have him tell me that he's not really interested in having the government invest in infrastructure. Paradoxically, that makes a lot of sense for where the Egyptian call center market is headed. You can build a Smart Village anywhere, and if it's linked to the global fiber network, you can run a world-class call center from it. With the barrier to entry so low, and governments everywhere awakening to the economic delight that is a 500-seat job site, Egypt's Smart Village, though beautiful, can be replicated anywhere. If I was the Information Minister of any mid-sized country aspiring to join the developed world, building a string of Smart Villages would be high on my to-do list.

So what does Egypt's minister plan on doing? Branding, marketing and human resources development, he told me. The minister, Dr. Tarek Kamel, has hit the nail right on the head. No country will make a splash on the international market by touting its technical underpinnings - we take that for granted now. You can't play in the flat world unless you've already proved willing to build the necessary technical substrate. I was encouraged, actually, by Dr. Kamel's remarks at the conference, and later privately to a group of industry reporters, about the importance of developing a continuing supply of highly skilled labor to staff the call centers his country wants to build and attract.

The government doesn't need to spend money on fiber. That's what private industry is for. Telecom Egypt, of course, is the government's incumbent carrier, so whether it qualifies as private industry is bit of a gray area. But the government can "convince" Telecom Egypt to dramatically reduce the tariffs for international access to IP and telecom services, so that Egypt's nascent call center industry can serve offshore companies. They can nudge the various outsourcing companies to present a united front to the outside world and sponsor gatherings where the rest of the world sees what's available. They can devote some of the sizable marketing budget that the country spends to promote tourism towards the economic and business development - promote Egypt as a brand, and make the argument about something other than who has the best fiber or the lowest cost labor.

The argument should be about labor quality, and availability, rather than about cost. Or so says Minister Kamel.

The baseline of that argument (or let's call it a business case, rather than an argument) rests on education, language, service culture, and continuous supply. I'll have more about those four areas in my next post (which will hopefully happen after lunch).