Yesterday I chaired the annual sourcing and offshoring day hosted by the National Outsourcing Association. It’s an annual all-day focus on all things related to offshoring. We were at the plush offices of law firm Lovells in the City – they have the most amazing auditorium at the top of their office.

The day focused on exploring some of the key themes and issues today in offshoring, so as you might expect there was a lot of debate on India vs China vs Philippines and so on, but I was particularly interested by something one of the participants said to me in the afternoon.

I was asking Stephen Page, chief executive of Sapphire Group, if he thought anything had been missed or not discussed, and he answered: “Yes, Web 2.0”.

Now, that’s not just because his company does a lot of Web 2.0 work. In fact, when I introduced the day I mentioned that I thought Web 2.0 and changing business models, and corporate structures would come up. After all, if you started a business tomorrow would you really invest in dozens of licences for email client software when you could just format Google Mail for free. But does it mean you just outsourced your email provision to the US?

So it was interesting that we spent most of the day focusing on the geographic regions, rather than the changing nature of business itself – that’s what is likely to drive offshoring far more.