Offshore outsourcing IT services has been growing in the region of 30% per annum in monetary terms in recent years and has been fuelled by a focus on cost savings. However, the growth in the use of offshored services has showed that its benefits are no longer just about price - they can include service quality improvements, scalability, better risk management and freeing up internal resources to focus on core value adding activities.

The leading offshore service providers have refined their approach to customer relationship management, commercial management and service delivery to become highly professional organisations delivering a full range of consulting services, software applications development and management, IT infrastructure management, help desks and business processing outsourcing.

Positive answers to many of the traditional concerns about offshoring are now available from 25 years of offshore service delivery and market development.

This article presents an introduction to offshore outsourcing, discusses the risks and issues involved, and gives guidelines for setting the offshore strategy and delivering the benefits from offshoring.