(Length: 12 pages)

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Vendors seeking to deliver business process services must contend with diverse and complex customer environments, including disparate business process platforms, nonstandard business processes, and customizations. Faced with these challenges — and forced to achieve one-to-many customer leverage in order to make money — BPO (business process outsourcing) providers are adopting layered service-delivery architecture capable of isolating them from complexity. An integration layer enabled by service-oriented architecture (SOA) represents the core of this emerging layer, but additional elements conducive to enabling BPO service delivery are also included. Because technology leverage is becoming so critical to delivering on BPO engagements successfully and profitably, customers should make evaluation of this architecture a key part of their vendor evaluation criteria. The impact of this approach will be most pronounced for suppliers serving major horizontals across multiple customers but will come to influence virtually all BPO delivery. Ultimately, vendor investments in this enabling platform will make BPO vendors better suppliers, and understanding BPO's importance will make customers better BPO consumers.