Gartner says outsourcing an irreversible trend

India will continue to be a key beneficiary with the global delivery outsourcing becoming mainstream and an irreversible mega-trend in both IT-services and business process outsourcing (BPO)," claims Gartner's 'Top ten predictions for the Asia Pacific region for 2004'.

Partha Iyengar, research vice-president at Gartner India assured that with the economic growth slowly making a revival in the US the current backlash against the BPO to India will soon subside.

"Many companies accross the US have admitted that the key to their survival is in their abilityto use resources wherever they are. This notion will soon gain ground among the populace and they will understand and do what is in the best interest for the company," said Iyengar.

Iyengar also dismissed the popular belief in the West that outsourcing is responsible for large-scale job losses in those economies. Offshore revenues account for only $19.5 billion of the $ 570 billion market for IT-services, so the current backlash is completely misplaced, according to Iyengar.

At present India accounts for $ 11 billion of the total global outsourcing of IT-services but inthe future one in ten jobs in the IT-services space will move from the developed nations to the devloping economies like India and China. By 2005 India's share will grow to 49 per cent of the total global outsourcing pie.

Though India is still maintains its headstart in the outsourcing game and will be able to retain its lead for the next 18 months it must take due notice of its greatest adversary China.

Though the language barrier is stopping China from tapping the English-speaking BPO market completely it is making its presence felt in the Japanese language market in a big way.