Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is the delegation of one or more IT-intensive business processes to an external provider that in turn owns, administers and manages the selected process based on defined and measurable performance criteria. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is one of the fastest growing segments of the Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) industry.

Business Process Outsourcing includes outsourcing of:

India has one of the largest pool of low-cost English speaking scientific and technical talent. This makes India one of the obvious choice to outsource to. Dell, Sun Microsystems, LG, Ford, GE, Oracle all have announced plans to scale up their operations in India. Others like American Express, IBM and British Airways are leveraging the cost advantage India has to offer while setting up call centers. Several foreign airline and banks have too set up business process operations in India.

Many European and US companies have realized that they should focus on their main business and outsource their Human Resource Department, accounting department etc. Managed Care Companies, which is more popularly known as Healthcare payers, are increasingly outsourcing business processes due to changing and challenging business environment and technological and legislative changes.

The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry in India has been growing 70 percent a year and is now worth $1.6 billion, employing 100,000 people. And as McKinsey analysts put it, BPO has to grow only 27% till 2008 to deliver $17 billion in revenue and employment of a million people.