In its widest sense 'offshoring' generally means undertaking work using labour that is normally based in a remote location. In practice this creates a wide range of scenarios that have characterised the growth and evolution of the IT offshore industry over the past 25 years.

Growth in offshoring has been in the region of 30% per annum in monetary terms and has been fuelled by a focus on cost savings. However the growth in the use of offshored services has illustrated that its benefits are no longer just about price - they can include service quality improvements, scalability, better risk management and the freeing up of 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.