Reverse Outsourcing
According to experts the economic downturn, weakening US currency and catastrophic unemployment rates in US will inspire some companies to move their outsourcing operations back to home. Reverse outsourcing will be also conditioned by availability of highly-skilled domestic resources, reduced labor cost and government incentives provided to companies that utilize domestic labor force. Some of the leading offshore providers already made acquisitions of small US based providers to take advantage of anticipated incentives.

Verticalization
Another major industry trend for years to come is verticalization, facilitated by the strength of second-tier suppliers and increased focus on specialization. Customers want more specific, vertically oriented skills and domain knowledge. The dynamic of the market has changed and now companies consider outsourcing of their mission-critical applications as measures to cut costs and keep productivity.

Providers that specialize themselves to a particular domain and offer expertise in the given area will grow their business at a rate higher than multi-faceted suppliers.

Going Green
Another area of growth for outsourcing is adoption of green initiatives on place. Budget cuts through the global financial crisis have pushed environmental enforcement back and forth. However, American and European vendors have lead the discovery and implementation of green initiatives and how to make operations more cost-effective by going green. Many offshore vendors can optimize client's infrastructure and reduce their technology’s carbon footprint.

Shift in delivery preference
According to the specialists from Everest Research Institute, shift in delivery preferences will push outsourcing suppliers to develop delivery networks of multiple locations in order to compete in the marketplace. It's common for big corporate clients to have many centers and branches across the globe and they need specific skills and location benefits for each location.

While India continues to retain its dominance as a global outsourcing location some companies will think of diversification to multiple locations. Driven not only by diversifying business risks, as recent terror attacks in India made people to think about sending some types of work to more safe locations, but closeness and no-time zone factors as well companies will source some types of work to nearshore locations.

Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America and Philippines might experience a fast growth due to their large talent pools and cultural and linguistic similarities with EU and US. China will be focusing on its rapidly growing domestic market and Japan.

Analytics and business intelligence
Many experts predict research and analytics will be the next critical functions to be outsourced. Customers want analytics embedded into their outsoiurcing process in order to drive better business decisions. Many suppliers already put a significant investment and developed expertise in these capabilities so they can provide the insight that customers would never have achieved on their own.

Addition to research and analytics functions, there will be a demand for business intelligence, especially on top of corporate infrastructure. Clients want to have a single master view of data to improve decision - making process.

The economic recession created many mergers and corporations expanded their operations by acquiring smaller companies, yet with their own infrastructure and corporate environment. As a result there is no one single view on cross-enterprise processes and information, so many companies have no idea of many of their operations and spending. To put the rights and integrate various divisions into seamless workflow companies need a unified view on their data.

Healthcare
With the healthcare reform and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which included legislation that impacts the healthcare industry there will be increase in healthcare IT outsourcing as domestic providers cannot implement these changes on their own at the needed pace.

Back to vertical trend more specialized suppliers will reap on progressive shift towards healthcare outsourcing.