The London School of Economics (LSE) Asia Research Centre has just published a paper by a friend of mine, Raja Mitra, titled IT Industry in Transformation: Opportunities and Challenges for India.

I know few people have time to read 100+ pages of academic consideration of what’s happening in the outsourcing business, but Raja has done a good job of making this paper relevant to what is really happening.

Some of his observations on the outlook for the next decade are:

• Global spending on IT and offshoring will grow significantly, creating more opportunities for countries such as India;
• Growth in India, China, and other Asian economies will eventually make these societies very large markets, ready to consume IT services rather than just export them;
• Indian firms in IT services will no longer be primarily servicing clients from India, the firms will offer far more global delivery.

The paper is an excellent overview of what’s happened to the sourcing industry in India since the recession started to bite. And Raja is particularly critical of the lazy habit in India of predictions becoming gospel. We have all read plenty of media stories about growth targets for this company or that company, or the industry in general. Often these targets end up reported as achievements, so Raja is quite critical of the quality of data the Indian industry produces to measure itself.

It’s well worth a read, with some really good observations on recent trends in the industry.

You can download a free copy of the LSE paper here.