Forget outsourcing and offshoring: the hottest new thing on the sourcing scene right now is business process outsourcing (BPO) – and even though it`s the new baby on the block in the outsourcing world, it already accounts for more than a third of the entire outsourcing market.

According to the Everest Research Institute, the outsourcing market in the United States in 2005 was $362 billion. BPO alone accounted for $129 billion (36 percent). Things are just as frantic in Western Europe, where research house Gartner predicts that the BPO market will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 9.4 percent, with total expenditure expected to reach $33 billion by 2008.