The Indian lab of IBM has brought out a next generation solution to protect against theft of sensitive data from call centres, a major concern of the growing Indian outsourcing market.

"We have developed a solution that offers advanced data masking technology, which is a speech analytics tool that detects and masks private and sensitive information, both audio and onscreen without disrupting customer services or business operations," IBM India Research Laboratory Director Guruduth Banavar said.

The technology solution has been internally code named AudioZapper.

Banavar claimed the solution, developed after 18 months of intensive research in India, was the only solution in the global marketplace that addressed complete security concerns of a call centre.

"There has been some attempts on data masking of conversation but it did not prove to be worthwhile. The IBM solution offers the industry the required protection of confidential data such as credit card numbers, personal identification numbers (PIN), social security numbers, from getting into wrong hands," he said.

Asked about the cost of the technology for call centres and business projections, Banavar said after development the product would be transferred to the marketing arm of the company.