The IT industry has come a long way. In the early days they provided customers with technical resources who would work directly on customer projects and be managed directly by the customers. This was followed by project based assignments that were managed using process control and TQM techniques. Life cycle management and milestones were liberally used for executing these projects. Most of the resources were managed by the vendor. Once many of these projects were completed, the IT industry gained exposure to the business side too (Karthik, thanks for this insight). This exposure helped companies build deep domain expertise and led to the creation of verticals. This led to the next era of outsourcing -- total solution providers. Under this umbrella, solutions providers could design databases, applications, business logic, UI and test these using modern techniques. The consulting side of the vendors began to flourish. One new concept created by this was BPO -- end-to-end management of the process. What is the next era going to look like? While many technological and delivery methods are likely, one thing is for sure -- work will be global and distributed. Vendors that have platforms to support such work will be highly successful.