Outsourcing, as the global business tendency, can be predicted as any other business process according to the current economic climate and prospective changes. On the basis of these predictions and the today’s state of the BPO market it is possible to outline some outsourcing trends for the nearest future.

Outsourcing companies’ consolidation

The fierce competition on the outsourcing market driven by the flattening economy will cause the consolidation on the global outsourcing market as many offshoring companies are ceasing to exist while more suppliers are emerging. Industry experts foretell merging of outsourcing companies and the acquisition of smaller ones by bigger players.

Outsourcing business globalization

The number of the countries offering effective outsourcing services is rising. By recent, India and China have been the main outsourcing destinations. However, recently the countries of Eastern Europe, Brazil and Mexico have joined the outsourcing race and now are considered very serious competitors of India and China. The growing number of the players on the global outsourcing market inevitably leads to the narrower specializations of outsourcing. This specialization will help smaller players distinguish themselves on the global outsourcing market.

Outsourcing will be closer to home

Outsourcing market globalization is assisting companies in outsourcing closer to their homes and obtaining better communication and better project management opportunities. Outsourcing destinations that include India and China will be challenged by the locations that are closer to US and European companies.

Shorter outsourcing contracts during the recession

In this harsh economic climate when many businesses are forced to leave their markets, companies are striving to seek shorter outsourcing contracts that provide more space to adjust volumes and service level terms.

Personal offshoring (P2P offshoring)

Offshoring is normally associated with big and middle-size businesses. The new trend in outsourcing evolves person-to-person offshoring, when outsourcing services are provided by individuals. Often these services are associated with freelance services. Such services don’t require team engagement and can be done by a single professional. These services may include but not limited to:

- Web design
- Web creation and maintenance
- SEO
- Copywriting, editorial and translation services
- Online tutoring services
- Marketing services

Green IT outsourcing

With the rising concern of environmental protection more and more companies today include the paragraph of environmental protection into their outsourcing contracts. Moreover, environmentalism is becoming a real trend in the world of IT outsourcing and now is often treated as the quality evaluation criteria.

Outsourcing services integration

More and more businesses prefer to work with outsourcing companies that offer complete packages of outsourcing services like network monitoring. That helps prevent from spreading different isolated businesses tasks to several offshoring companies. Thus, the prioritized companies will be those that can deliver all aspects of outsourced processes in one service package. Web development is the simple example. As a rule, IT outsourcing companies that specialize on web-sites creation also provide web-design services, maintenance and SEO for their clients.