Service outsourcing includes BPO (Business Process Outsourcing), ITO (Information Technology Outsourcing, Information Technology Outsourcing), KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing, Knowledge Process Outsourcing). The three are collectively referred to as the service outsourcing industry. 

service outsourcing refers to a service delivery way in which a service outsourcing provider provides a comprehensive solution to a specific service business to help customers reduce or eliminate expenses and management costs in that aspect of the business, so that customers can focus all their efforts on core competencies. It is a new form of service trade, the main practice is to transfer a certain part of the business content of foreign customers to other countries through the internet for processing, to reduce costs and obtain higher profits. 

the customer market for service outsourcing trade is developed countries where business processes have been standardized, such as Europe, the United States and Japan. business service companies in these countries consider the needs of cost, outsource the non-core business in their business processes to other foreign service companies, and transfer data processing to other countries with lower workforce costs by using internet technology to carry out data processing and 24-hour interactive service support, so that foreign business companies can complete the entire business service work at a low cost. The above process can be reflected in the following typical service outsourcing cases. 

The earliest service outsourcing was concentrated in the fields of computers, information technology and related services, so it was called computer and related services business process outsourcing, that is, IPO (Information Process Outsourcing). According to the classification of ATS’s service departments, this type of business includes consulting services related to computer hardware installation, software implementation services and data processing services. Later, with the development of Internet technology and the improvement of broadband capabilities, service outsourcing gradually extended to a series of enterprise management affairs, so that enterprises can separate a certain business process link and hand it over to service outsourcing companies to do, which is the so-called commercial business process outsourcing, that is, BPO (Business Process Outsourcing). According to UNCTAD’s E-Commerce and Development Report 2003, such BPO is commonly found in finance (including banking and insurance), asset management, health, customer service, human resources, marketing, and other Internet-related services, involving a fragmented sector 

There is no fundamental difference between the so-called IPO trade and the BPO trade, the difference is only that the former is concentrated in the electronic information industry, while the latter is widely distributed in other industries. The main reason for this discrepancy is that the service outsourcing business of the electronic information industry precedes other industries. Therefore, we believe that the IPO business can be classified into the category of BPO, that is, IPO and BPO business in the narrow sense can be collectively referred to as BPO in the broad sense. The reason is that both are based on the trade form of providing services to a certain business process link of the enterprise under the support of information technology, and both belong to the same business form in modern e-commerce. The discussion here will use the broad concept of BPO.