The Big Blue has found itself in hot water once again when earlier this month, disagreements over the company’s outsourcing contract with US state, Texas, lead to an ultimatum from the state to fix the alleged problems involved in their outsourcing deal.

Contrary to the slowdown projected for IT outsourcing growth, in just a span of a few days, three big outsourcing companies won IT outsourcing contracts all from different regions in the world.

The Big Blue is making the state of Indiana and its residents see red. In a series of events that began with the signing of a very profitable outsourcing deal between the state of Indiana and technology outsourcing company IBM, the deal has now ended up with IBM (NYSE:IBM) filing a countersuit against Indiana late last week in an affair that began as, well, somewhat good, to bad and now, to worse.

With the passage of the historic, although much maligned, Obama healthcare reform bill in the US, a new opportunity has opened up for outsourcing companies as hospitals and insurance providers will now be seeking ways of minimizing expenses.

Cloud Computing is a computer concept that is starting to appear in the limelight of outsourcing and IT companies. It is an alternative solution for computer services where one service is shared by many through a collection of servers. This means that instead of installing a program into a single computer unit in the company, the program can be accessed by multiple units via the internet. Now what does that mean? It means savings on licensing original products and cost reduction on IT maintenance, a problem that has become a vital and important issue for chief information officers according to experts.

Last year, the economic downturn caused some organizations to temporarily scale back on I.T. outsourcing efforts while they tackle fundamental issues including keeping the company afloat. This year, I.T. outsourcing is making a comeback… in Asia. As Dell Services (NASDAQ:DELL) Chairman Jim Champy predicts the Asian I.T. outsourcing market will grow much faster in 2010. “IT outsourcing is set to rise in Asia as the region’s companies begin to modernize business processes and technology systems in a build-out that could last decades. We see, as most providers do, the Asian markets growing faster - clearly more than Europe, and certainly faster than the US”, explains Mr. Champy.

Keeping abreast with the world is certainly a difficult job, especially now with social media, blogs and other such sources all over the place; it’s becoming difficult to know exactly where to look.  I myself have different favored sources of information, including those for news headlines, and social media, that I search regularly.   On one such occasion, I came across the Top 10 Business Deals of 2009 from TIME.com.  With regards to outsourcing, the item included in the top business deals for 2009 was the HP (NYSE:HPQ) - EDS deal.