This IDC study represents a comprehensive overview of the market opportunities and forecasts for business process outsourcing (BPO) in the Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) or APEJ region. This BPO overview covers qualitative as well as quantitative insights across 12 APEJ countries for 2005 up until 2010. This evaluation is made possible through IDC's continuous engagement of BPO players across APEJ, which includes interviews with executives, site visits, customer interviews, and using IDC's contracts database.

This study is of value to BPO SPs as well as enterprises in answering questions such as, what is the size of the BPO market in APEJ; how big was it a few years ago, how big will it get in five years' time and how fast is it growing; what are the unique characteristics and the trends for BPO across business horizontals (human resources [HR], training, finance and accounting [F&Amp;A], procurement, customer care) and by countries in APEJ; and what is needed to clinch deals, what are enterprises demanding and are vendors meeting those needs.

"APEJ's nonhomogenized markets will continue to be a challenge in BPO adoption. Flexible approaches that help companies pilot BPO rather than large-scale end-to-end solutions will be important. In a region known for its low cost, the value BPO needs to project is one of helping enterprises benchmark to best practices and to penetrate global markets," says Conrad Chang, senior analyst, BPO, IDC Asia/Pacific.