I travelled home from the Nasscom conference in Mumbai at the weekend, suffering a taxi with a puncture on the way to the airport. Still, I did manage to get there on time and thanks to the great online check-in system on ba.com I was all set to go when I arrived at the airport, though the Mumbai international airport version of a fast bag drop is rather more pedestrian than that on offer at Heathrow.

The BA chief information officer Paul Coby was speaking at Nasscom so I guess any BA complaints could be directed to him personally, but after taking too many flights over the past week I really liked my BA homecoming experience. Not least the fact that 26-year-old episodes of Only Fools and Horses are on the entertainment system, welcoming the weary British traveller back to Peckham.

I’m going to write up some comments from people I spoke to at Nasscom over the next few days, but I wanted to immediately comment on something that struck me while I was there. It’s something that I spoke to a few people about and everyone seemed to agree with me – that the Nasscom annual conference is becoming less about India and more about the business of global outsourcing and IT services in general. India is just where Nasscom is based, but the conference itself is starting to become a focal point for regions across the world promoting their outsourcing services.

For example, consider this: The pre-conference discussions were dominated by International Business Wales, the government body that promotes investment into Wales. Similar pre-conference discussions featured representatives of the hi-tech sector in Pakistan, Malaysia, and China. The evening reception on the first day of the conference was sponsored by Nova Scotia, Canada. Canadian delegates were handing out newspapers extolling the virtues of investing in their country. Lunch on day two was sponsored by Costa Rica, and dinner that evening was thanks to the Egyptians. The keynote sessions on day three featured representatives of Egypt, China, and Australia and then the lunch was funded by our very own Think London. The final session of the conference examined software innovation in India, China, and Israel.

This international involvement in what used to be an India-focused technology conference underlines a couple of points. India has become the centre of the international IT service industry – this really is where a lot of the thinking is taking place. Also, it does demonstrate that the industry in India is far more mature than even just a few years ago. Many of these international trade bodies are partnering with India because they want to capture a little piece of the magic dust for their own IT services industry.

Nasscom is becoming the central reference point for the global IT services industry and it would not surprise me if they even dropped ‘India’ from the title of the conference in 2009.