According to the report, the growth of the offshore PDS market and other service lines based on the global service delivery model has been built upon the capabilities of leading offshore companies in hiring, training, and managing large numbers of new employees.

According to ARC advisory group service director Steve Banker, "When you have forecasted growth of over 25 per cent for a market that is already larger than a billion dollar, you are looking at an extraordinary market. One explanation for this is the power of the GSD business model."

The GSD model has proven itself across areas such as custom software development, IT infrastructure support, call center services (and other similar business process outsourcing services), application implementations, and now PDS.

The value proposition is simple; knowledge workers from low cost regions are paid about 25 per cent of what their counterparts in the west get. Though that does not necessarily mean a total savings of 75 per cent. There are learning curves for the service provider's engineers and increased travel and supervision costs for the western companies. Nevertheless, the power of this model is demonstrated by the extraordinarily fast growth of the leading Indian IT firms that rely on GSD.