Michael Rehkopf, a partner at TPI Asia-Pacific, says India will continue to be the favorite location, although China is growing its popularity, and other Asian countries will capture a piece of the outsourcing action in 2007

Q. What was the biggest IT news in 2006
The record revenue and earning growth reported by various Indian service providers provides evidence of acceleration in outsourcing and offshoring, and highlights the impact of offshore delivery models on the sizes of outsourcing contract values.

What is the No. 1 issue that you think the IT industry should band together and address collectively?
Resiliency of hardware, software and services to ensure the ability of global commerce to continue to operate even if the infrastructure is under attack will become more important in our continually more inter-connected economy.

What would you like to see from tech vendors in 2007?
We need more productivity-based services offerings and a shift beyond labor arbitrage to deliver true improvements. This is about true process improvement delivering productivity improvements, which is quite different from doing roughly the same things with "cheaper" labor.

Will India continue to be the top choice location for offshore outsourcing?
India will continue its position of strength in 2007 due to both its demographics (large young population) and the maturity of the leading firms there (both Indian and MNC).

Any predictions regarding the level of activities in other Asian locations like China, Singapore, Philippines and Malaysia in 2007?
These countries will all continue to attract a degree of interest but with the exception of China, their scale means they won't get the public attention that India does. China will continue to expand its service offerings and scale but start to hit its constraints in 2007.

More insights from Michael in his Sourcing Insight blog.