BANGALORE: The recent anti-outsourcing campaign in the US and UK against moving jobs to cost-effective locales like India, Mexico and Philippines is a sensitive issue, and would not dampen the $one trillion global IT and ITES outsourcing industry, according to outsourcing guru, Michael Corbett. The President and CEO of Michael F Corbett and Associates, Corbett is bringing the "Outsourcing World Summit Series" to India. Instrumental in bringing this summit to Bangalore is the host, STPI. The 2003 India Outsourcing Summit, is slated to be held in the city on October 15^th and 16^th, 2003.

"Moving jobs is a very sensitive issue in any part of the world. Even India would be quite anxious about the job opportunities from the (Outsourcing) sector. This would be overcome gradually over a period of time" says Corbett. "The situation is similar to the outsourcing of the manufacturing sector and that of the technology revolution, when everybody voiced about their jobs being on stake. After realizing the benefits, the voices died down and people went ahead with building the economy," he states, over a conference call announcing the launch of the summit.

However he warned that because the moving of jobs is a sensitive issue it has to be dealt with care and caution. "We have to make sure that the sentiments are not hurt. No need to panic or give too much importance to this, because it is not going to impact the outsourcing industry. Businesses need to find ways to be increasingly cost effective and efficient, and outsourcing is one of the best ways to cut bottom line costs."

The IT minister for the Government of Karnataka, DB Inamdar shrugged off anti-outsourcing campaigns, as impacting only government jobs and reiterated that enterprises cannot think of increasing the bottom line without outsourcing their processes. He was bullish about the outsourcing industry receiving opportunities from other countries apart from America. "Works are coming from European countries like UK, Germany, Belgium and other parts of the world including Australia, apart from US. So we are not dependent on America alone for work to be outsourced," he said.

According to Corbett, outsourcing of IT and ITES contributes only 20 percent of the $5 trillion global outsourcing industry. Manufacturing, Services and Facilities management, are some of the other sectors, which are significant contributors to the outsourcing industry. Ireland, Canada, Caribbean, Mexico, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines are some of the countries spotted on the IT and ITES outsourcing radar. China, Russia, Israel are some of the countries increasing their IT knowledge base.

India garners about one to two percent of the global outsourcing sector in the IT and ITES space. This is expected to increase significantly during the coming years, according to Corbett. Bangalore, among the other Indian cities, is looked upon as a major outsourcing hubs for IT and ITES. There has been a significant increase in the number of ITES companies setting foot in the Garden City, now popularly dubbed the Silicon Valley of India. BV Naidu, Director, STPI, supplemented this with, "Out of the 45 new companies that have come to Bangalore to set shop during this quarter, 13 are in the BPO space, as against nine during the corresponding period last year. Out of the 45, 30 are fully funded overseas companies, setting foot in India. The investment from these multinational companies have crossed Rs 500 crore, representing a growth of 52 percent when compared to last year."

The city plays host to the offshore development centers of IBM, Sun Microsystem, Cisco, Oracle and HP among others. Globally recognized Indian software bellwethers, Infosys and Wipro are also headquartered in Bangalore. Apart from these marquee names such as Accenture and Goldman Sachs are also setting up their own centers for BPO. The IT and ITES workforce in Bangalore is estimated to be in the range of 140,000 to 150,000 and is projected to grow at 30 percent, annually.