3.3 million US jobs to be outsourced by 2015
By siliconindia staff writer   |   Monday, 13 October 2003, 19:30 IST
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BANGALORE: The trend towards going offshore is gathering momentum in the technology sector. Many IT services giants are scrambling to bolster their offshore resources with over 3.3 million jobs set to go offshore by 2015, according to John C McCarthy, group director, Forrester Research. At an event entitled “Segmenting the offshore market and dynamics of BPO,” organised by Nasscom in Bangalore, McCarthy said companies especially in the financial services were moving more work offshore. This increased interest in offshore work also means that now the CEO of an organisation is getting directly involved in moving work, he added. Companies were also looking to do higher-end work from offshore locations. (Can Indian BPO firms survive the US backlash against outsourcing?) However, McCarthy said companies had made several mistakes along the way. Importantly they thought that smaller projects were better and bargain hunting was the way to go. However, experience over the last two years had proved that a certain minimum size was required to execute an offshore project. Despite the optimism on the offshoring front, Mr McCarthy felt that the doubters yet had their concerns over issues such as security and disaster recovery. IT vendors need to proactively project their domain expertise and look to have multi-geography set-ups for disaster recovery requirements. Meanwhile, as part of the whole offshoring move, companies are also looking at the BPO opportunity, according to McCarthy. A third of respondents to a Forrester survey had revealed that they had some sort of BPO plans. The primary areas of interest were in the human resources space including payroll and benefits processing. Despite this, McCarthy said most vendors over-stated their capabilities, with most of them having eight to ten clients in verticals such as financial services, high technology etc. He also expected very few large multi-process deals to happen, with organisations instead preferring to split their work among several vendors. With technology eliminating a lot of the paper work, aggressive price cuts were likely and in future, BPO vendors need to get into specialised areas of operation, he said. (source: Economic Times)

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