The bill introduced by US Senators Mr. Chuck Grassley and Mr. Dick Durbin on Thursday is expected to have grim implications for the Indian IT firms, as it aims at curtailing the use the of H-1B and L1 visas, thereby limiting the competitiveness of the offshore vendors.

The bill proposes to alter the H-1B and L1 visa stipulations in such a way that US employers would be prohibited from employing additional H-1B and L-1 guest-workers in case more than 50 per cent of their workers are H-1B and L-1 visa holders. The implementation of the proposal in its current form could cause a big dent in the profitability of the Indian IT services market.

According to the "Perspective 2020: Transform Business, Transform India" report by industry association Nasscom and McKinsey, India needs to address some fundamental problems in case it wants its IT and BPO industry to generate an additional $150 billion revenue potential by 2020, over and above the $225 billion revenue the sector is expected to log.

According to a recent report by the information technology research and advisory firm Gartner, the economic downturn and protectionist measures of western countries notwithstanding, the market share of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry will likely increase two-fold over the next couple of years.

The report said that Indian vendors in the BPO sector would experience growth, owing to factors like dependable service delivery, sustained acquisitions of Europe and North America-based shared service centers, as well as revenue growth from continental Europe by way of partnerships.

A large number of US firms have started to pull outsourcing operations from the traditions destinations such as India, probably due to revelation of Satyam's accounting fraud and terror threats in the aftermath of Mumbai terrorist attack on 26/11.

Infosys BPO, the business process outsourcing arm of Infosys Technologies, declared that it got a ‘positive’ rating in Gartner’s MarketScope for Comprehensive Finance and Accounting Business Process Outsourcing, 2008.

Infosys BPO was amongst the 11 vendors judged for the reports that focused on vendor potentialities in the wide-ranging F&A BPO market.

Wipro Technologies, the global IT services division of Wipro, has informed that its Business Process Outsourcing division, Wipro BPO, is setting up a Shared Services centre in Curitiba, Brazil for AmBev.

AmBev is the biggest private company for consumer goods in Brazil and the biggest brewer for Latin America. The Company was created on the 1st of July of 1999, in association with brewers Brahma and Antarctica.