India domestic process management services (PMS) segment forecast to reach $683m in 2010, a 31.1% increase from 2009 revenue of $521m, according to global consultancy Gartner.

The market will experience steady growth through 2014 when process management services revenue in India will reach $1.6bn.

Large scale outsourcing of process management will bring in the next wave of growth in the Indian domestic IT/IT-enabled services (ITES) industry. High economic growth, competitive pressure, agility, time to market, innovation and adoption across verticals and breadth of services will be driving this high growth rate in this segment.

In 2009, the Indian IT Services/business process outsourcing (BPO) market showed resilience with greater interest from corporate level executives in outsourcing decisions. Prioritisation for outsourcing spending aligned with organisations' agility, scalability and cost focus. Cautious buyers, cost containment were evident in mature verticals.

Currently process management services are restricted largely to telecommunications and banking and financial services sectors.

However moving forward it is likely to be adopted in verticals such as government, utilities, healthcare and retail. These are high growth sectors with high degree of transaction processing work requirement.

Such transactional processes, although crucial, are not core to the activities of those organisations. There are high degrees of inefficiencies built into the system.

Outsourcing of such processes to third party specialists would bring in advantages of efficiency, efficacy and cost thereby increasing the competitive edge.