US-based technology research house Gartner Inc said during the current year India's revenues from offshore business process outsourcing (BPO) would grow from slightly under one billion dollars to 1.2 billion dollars.

This will represent 66 percent of the global offshore market -- where jobs are done outside the client's region, Gartner said.

"It will be supplemented by significant additional revenue from internal company operations and US firms setting up their own delivery centres out of India," it said.

A lot of foreign firms such as airlines, credit card companies and banks have shifted their "back-office" work to India which has the world's second largest pool of English-speaking computer literates after the United States.

Last year the BPO sector accounted for about one-fourth of India's total software export revenues of 9.5 billion dollars.

Gartner said Indian companies must demonstrate their capability and deep knowledge of specific industries to grab lucrative outsourcing jobs from abroad and warned they should not be complacent.

"Most of today's offshore BPO opportunity remains at the level of out-tasking a component of a business process and relegated mostly to contact centers and transaction processing," said Sujay Chohan, research vice president for Gartner.

Gartner said that while offshore BPO was growing, it remained an immature market.

Though India is the top country for delivery of offshore outsourcing services among large companies new regions are emerging, it said.

"Other English-speaking nations across the world are ramping up their delivery capability and putting into place aggressive investment-friendly policies to attract BPO investment," said Chohan. "BPO is truly a global delivery opportunity."

SPACE.WIRE