The recent study „IT Outsourcing Study Europe 2013“ from Whitelane Research reveals several facts which are in line with my personal experiences but seem not always to be discussed in public. Thus I am happy to see a recent report by a neutral body clearly indicating interesting results when it comes to IT outsourcing and especially offshore application development and maintenance.
One key finding of the authors is that 78 percent of participating companies will continue to outsource more. Although it sometimes does not seem popular to talk about it, it happens and will remain a key topic for most companies.
The second key finding – once again – not extremely popular to talk about but quite obvious is that cost reduction is the main driver for those companies that decide to outsource more (cited by 69 percent)..
A positive signal is the fact that customers clearly indicate they do understand there is still room to improve their own governance. From my perspective, this indicates a far better understanding how to achieve win-win with the providers compared to several years ago as well as a significant increase in an open communication of own responsibilities for a success at customers management.
But most important from all the statements made in the Whitelane study is the fact that customer satisfaction is highest with India based offshore Service providers. This is especially noticeable since I believe Central European customers in average to be more critical to offshoring to India than US or UK based customers. It is nice to see my past employer Tech Mahindra to rank as number 3 of the providers with the highest customer satisfaction. This very much falls in line with my personal impression when having ramped up central Europe for “TechM“. The top as well as middle management was truly entrepreneurial and willing to “walk the extra mile” for its customers. It was a pleasure to see this recognized by several CIOs of German corporate customers and this to build a basis for long term relationships..
All aforementioned statements underline the significant benefits to be potentially achieved with offshore or nearshore outsourcing. Of course, this requires a proper strategy, supplier selection as well as a ongoing “knowledgeable and strict but fair” governance of the projects. This is exactly where the pliXos vision comes into play. Our tools allow easy and cost efficient re-usage and share of best practices for the benefit of every player in the market. Furthermore we build on automation and standardisation wherever possible and thus offer lowest failure, highest efficiency and a unique comparability of the services. This is by far more effective than doing everything on its own or to contract expensive consultants for every task. The pliXos approach is supported further by a free B2B marketplace for software projects to simply and fast get started.
I hope this viewpoint is supported by readers and look forward to our comments or direct feedback. Jörg Stimmer, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Note: Source of all pictures: Press release of “IT Outsourcing Study Europe 2013“ from Whitelane Research ( http://www.whitelane.com/#!whitelane-research-studies/ca4p )
