IT enabled Services

The Indian Information Technology enabled Services (ITeS), which started with basic data entry tasks over a decade ago, is witnessing an expansion in its scope of services to include increasingly complex processes involving rule-based decision making and even research services requiring informed individual judgment. It now offers services such as knowledge process outsourcing (KPO), legal process outsourcing (LPO), games process outsourcing (GPO) and design outsourcing among others.

The number of patent filings from Indian R&D centres has been growing over the years. More and more cutting-edge products are being developed in India. While outsourcing lower-level technical jobs to India has been a practice of multinational technology firms, the increasing reliance on Indian R&D operations is a growing trend. Aviation majors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin looking at setting up captive R&D centres in India. In fact, estimates by National Association of Software Services Companies (Nasscom) and Booz Hamilton say that engineering services outsourcing could touch US$ 40 billion by 2020.

India continues to have an edge over other outsourcing countries also because of the global confidence it inspires in terms of turn around time (TAT).

Growing at a rate of 30.7 per cent, with revenues of US$ 39.6 billion in 2006-07, the IT/ITeS sector's projected figures for 2007-08 stand at US$ 49-50 billion at a growth rate of 24-27 per cent, says Nasscom. Of this US$ 50 billion, a considerable chunk will be contributed by the domestic market. With the fast growing Indian economy being largely consumer-led, companies are now opting for BPO services to beat competition. Nasscom says the domestic BPO market is expected to grow to US$ 7.6 billion in 2011. The segment is growing at about 40 per cent CAGR.

The domestic BPO segment is growing at 35-40 per cent a year and employs 1,50,000-2,00,000 people. According to Nasscom, domestic BPO revenues almost doubled to US$ 1.18 billion in 2006-07 compared to US$ 600 million in 2005. The domestic market is expected to reach US$ 10 billion by FY08, at a growth rate of 20-22 per cent. Some global BPOs such as Aegis Communications Group, Firstsource Solutions, Infovision, Intelenet, IBM-Daksh are now aggressively looking at the local market for BPO business.

However, hardware still constitutes a large portion of the domestic pie at US$ 7.6 billion compared to US$ 5.6 billion from services, US$ 1.6 billion from software and US$ 1.2 billion from BPO.

ITeS/BPO exports grew by 33.5 per cent to clock revenues of US$ 8.4 billion in FY07, marginally higher than the growth of 33.3 per cent in FY06. India holds a dominant share of the global offshore IT-ITeS sector (65 per cent of the global market in offshore IT and 46 per cent of the ITeS market). However, at US$ 31.3 billion in FY07, Indian IT-ITeS exports account for less than 3 per cent of the global spend on IT and ITeS. If India maintains its current share of the global offshore IT-ITeS market, IT- ITeS exports from India will exceed US$ 60 billion by FY10 and US$ 86 billion by FY12. Further, growing at current trends, Indian IT-ITeS exports are projected to reach nearly US$ 330 billion by FY20 (nearly 14 per cent of the projected worldwide spend).

For exports, the US and UK are the largest markets. However, the share of Europe has been increasing steadily. For FY06, revenues from the Americas totalled 67 per cent, Europe 25 per cent and rest of the world, 7.7 per cent. This is an area, the ITeS sector is working on now - increasing its business from countries other than the US.


Information Technology Sector IBEF: February 21, 2006

Over the past decade, the Information Technology (IT) industry has become one of the fastest growing industries in India, propelled by exports (the industry accounted for more than a quarter of India’s services exports in 2004-05). The key segments that have contributed significantly (96 percent of total) to the industry’s exports include – Software and services (IT services) and IT-enabled services (ITeS) ie business services. Over a period of time, India has established itself as a preferred global sourcing base in these segments and they are expected to continue to fuel growth in the future.

These segments have been evolving over the years into a sophisticated model of operations. Indian IT and ITES companies have created global delivery models (onsite-near shore-offshore), entered into long term engagements with customers, expanded their portfolio of services offerings, built scale, extended service propositions beyond cost savings to quality and innovation, evolved their pricing models and have tried to find sustainable solutions to various issues such as risk management, human capital attraction and retention and cost management.

A key demand driver for the Indian IT services and ITeS industry has been the changing global business landscape which has exerted performance pressures on multinational enterprises.