•You will hear an opening keynote at the 2nd IT 0utsourcing Conference & Expo.•

Good morning! I am pleased to address you today at this 2nd IT Outsourcing Conference and Expo. If my memory serves me right, I spoke on a similar occasion last year and, like you, I find that the notion of IT Outsourcing has taken on some new dimensions. I should like to share some of my thoughts with you.
     Catalyzed by international trading,  the business environment has become increasingly competitive nowadays.  To  strive  for  survival  or  sustain competitiveness in market, organizations have in work on initiatives to reduce costs and enhance efficiency.  Outsourcing has been an important strategy to help achieve these organizational goals. Through outsourcing, organizations can farm out non-core functions to outsourcers, enabling the organizations to re-prioritize and re-direct their resources on their core areas of competency. With this value  preposition,  it  is  common  to  see outsourcing being enlisted on the standing agenda of most organizations today.  In this regard,  from what I can observe government departments are not immune to competitive forces. In fact, in some cases government faces some unique and more challenging situations than the private sector when it comes to outsourcing.  These  include  the procurement framework, the business and contract models, terms of payment, and measures to address the issues arising from surplus staff as a result of outsourcing.
      Let me spend a few minutes on the outsourcing landscape as we see it. Over the years, the classical model of IT outsourcing, e.g. project-by-project outsourcing, has taken on new varieties, including organizational and business process Outsourcing. With the maturity of the outsourcing market and the increasing integration between business and IT, we see there is an increasing trend for organization to consider business process outsourcing.  With these  additional  choices,   the  approach  to Outsourcing in a given organization has become necessarily complex and requires in some cases careful crafting of contracts and extensive due diligence exercises.
     We also see a growing trend of outsourcing taking place in this part of the region too. In a recent forecast  by  Gartner,   it  predicts  that  the Asia/Pacific IT services market will grow at a compounded annual  growth  rate  of 9  percent through 2009, outpacing the global growth rate of 5.5 percent. We see the growth mainly coming from countries such as China and India which have been actively developing their Outsourcing markets in the recent years.