Evaluation Centre's overview of the outsourcing market, including business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions and IT outsourcing services
...Outsourcing in its many guises is now established as a viable option for any organisation. These days, many companies have considerable experience of outsourcing and are better able to negotiate a deal that will deliver real value and benefits to their business. For their part, the suppliers have shown themselves capable of developing more flexible solutions in what has become a much more competitive market and the choice of options has never been greater.
The broad range of IT functions that potentially can be outsourced is highlighted in this year’s
Evaluation Centre survey. The most popular are website & e-business (54%), followed by application support & maintenance (45%), wide area support & operations (45%) and software development (41%). The areas likely to see the strongest growth in the future are data centre operations (18%), desktop systems (13%) and security (11%).
In the early days of outsourcing, it was very much the case that organisations would seek out a single supplier to take over their IT operations. Now only 14% of companies favour this approach and as outsourcing has become much more sophisticated, the majority (69%) prefer to choose different suppliers for different outsourcing requirements.
The proportion of IT budget that goes on outsourcing varies greatly between different organisations. At the top end, 3% of the survey respondents spend 75% to 100% of their budget and 10% between 50% and 75%. At the lower end, 28% estimate thatthey spend less than 10% of their IT budget, 28% between 10% and 25% and 10% between 25% and 50%.