Venkatesh Roddam, one of the world's most prominent outsourcing executives, comes from Hyderabad, India.

Hundreds of miles from the ocean, Hyderabad nevertheless was a world leader in the pearl industry, Mr. Roddam said at Carnegie Mellon University yesterday, because of the expertise of the artisans who drilled holes in the pearls to make jewelry.

Mr. Roddam, the CEO of Satyam BPO Ltd., said he sees the growth of outsourcing in much the same way. "The world is full of intelligent markets," he said, and increasingly, jobs will be carried out wherever the expertise resides, not just because they can be done more cheaply in a particular location.

He was at the university yesterday because his company is the first in the world to achieve the top level of excellence using quality standards for outsourcing developed at Carnegie Mellon.

He was part of a panel that included representatives from Accenture, a major outsourcing consultant; TPI, an outsourcing adviser involved in 20 percent of such deals worldwide; and a former global executive from IBM, all of whom praised the Carnegie Mellon standards for giving outsourcing companies and their clients a way to monitor quality from the outset of negotiations to the end of a contract.

For Satyam, the advantage of using the university's eSourcing Capability Model is that every aspect of its business can be measured.

"The certification forces us to quantify," Mr. Roddam said. "It speaks a language of metrics; it does not speak English. What it has forced us to do as a business culture is to say what I haven't measured, I probably shouldn't have done in the first place. If I can measure it, I know exactly where I stand."

Satyam calculates everything from whether employees meet sales goals to how long it takes them to handle a phone call to how many of the documents they prepare are rejected by supervisors for errors.

That has allowed Satyam to set up a "digital dashboard" for top managers that notifies them whenever any group's key measurements fail to meet their standards.

The standards also have helped propel the company beyond just offering simpler outsourcing services such as employee benefits processing, procurement and accounting to specialized work such as managing heavy equipment manufacturing plants and designing drug labels for GlaxoSmithKline.

Those kind of partnerships will become a bigger part of the outsourcing world, the panelists said, which also means the future will not revolve around a simple debate over "shipping jobs overseas," as the current presidential candidates have put it.

The problem with that rhetoric, said Jane Siegel, director of Carnegie Mellon's Information Technology Services Qualification Center, is that "it focuses too much on where the work is going and not enough on what kind of work needs to be done."

Or, as Mr. Roddam put it, "It's a virtual world already."

"Where things happen best is where they will happen -- not just because it is cheaper in a certain place. If there is quality available in a particular location at a particular point in time, it will automatically attract business."