Wow, big news today in the BPO/outsourcing space. IBM plans to hire 5000 people in India to scale up its BPO operations in India. That's huge considering so many companies are scaling down and some even completely closing shop offshore.

IBM's expansion news come as a pleasant surprise and actually create quite a bit of optimism for all of us who work in the outsourcing field. It signifies perhaps the turning of the tide in favor of anticipated economic growth in 2010.

I'm looking forward to learning more about the new outsourcing contracts IBM has won to justify their expansion in India. Hopefully their expansion is a well-thought out move that won't result in only short-term growth.