Despite some states in the United States protesting against outsourcing software development and business process outsourcing to India, global majors are looking for opportunities to outsource work worth around $5 billion to the country in 2003-04.

Outsourcing advisory firm neoIT said global majors were looking at strategic outsourcing partners, acquisitions and captive development centres to outsource to India.

According to industry sources, leading Indian software services companies are vying for these orders.

"We are helping some of the top Fortune 500 companies to outsource software and business processes to India. Indian companies will get some of the biggest orders this year," said Cliff Justice, senior vice-president, neoIT.

According to Justice, the software development and business process outsourcing work coming to India will involve 400-2,000 people initially. "Many of these projects may ramp up in the second stage," he said.

Companies likely to outsource to India include financial institutions, business conglomerates and technology majors.

Some of the global companies would look at acquisitions as a way to start and ramp up operations in India, Justice said. "Some of these companies will acquire the second and third rung companies in the country", he added.

In business process outsourcing, companies outsource their business operations like accounting, human resource management, sales and marketing assistance to other companies to reduce the cost of managing these functions.

"The Indian business process outsourcing sector is still in its nascent stage. This year, companies will be looking at consolidation to handle major projects," he said.

However, the small and medium software services companies are likely to suffer because the Fortune 500 companies and large corporations prefer to work only with the top 10 Indian companies.

Besides, the presence of global software services majors like IBM Global, Accenture, EDS and CSC may spoil the party for Indian companies. These software majors are ramping up their Indian operations to meet their global requirements from here.