BPO, offshoring may be obsolete words by 2015

"In five to ten years, you will see a dramatic change in the way people are serviced. Who will care from which location they are being serviced? A large number of processes will get globalised. There will be more automation. Companies will reinvent themselves every six months, and IT will be further embedded in their processes. The BPO sector, too, will be providing end-to-end business services. In fact, there may be no such word like BPO or offshoring," asserts Nasscom President Som Mittal.

Sudin Apte, senior analyst with Forrester Research, concurs and predicts there will be two types of players by 2015. "You will have five or six large players with multiple lines of services across low-cost delivery centres," he says.

These players will comprise both Indian players like Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys and multinationals like IBM and Accenture. These firms will have thousands of workers in different geographies, and be servicing many industry verticals. Forrester referred to them as Billion-Dollar Babies 18 months ago.

Today, they lead over the rest of the offshore vendor pack by a widening gap of almost a billion dollars. Currently, TCS, Infosys and Wipro contribute more than 46 per cent of total IT services export from India.

There will also be "specialist" firms that will cater to niche verticals, three or four lines of services and use India as a predominant base, says Apte.

But smaller firms