The 2015 United Kingdom IT Outsourcing Study, conducted by Whitelane Research in collaboration with PA Consulting Group, investigates more than 800 unique IT outsourcing contracts held by more than 260 of the top IT spending organisations in the UK region.
The total combined annual value of the contracts included in this study is more than £15 billion, almost three quarters of the UK market by value. All industry sectors are represented.
Key findings from the UK study include:
The outsourcing market will continue to grow. Sixty-nine percent of all respondents in the study confirm that they will continue to outsource at the same rate or more, with 40 percent saying they will outsource more indicating that the UK market still has significant growth potential.
Over 70 percent of all organisations use nearshoring or offshoring. This is expected to further increase in the coming years. Focus on core business (cited by 68 percent) is the main driver for companies planning to outsource more. However, the need to access new/better resources (up 8 percent compared to last year) as well as the need to transform the business (up 9 percent compared to last year) have become significantly more important. The emphasis on business transformation suggests a strengthening of demand from business for new applications.
The service provider community shows a strong overall performance with clients being satisfied with an impressive 86 percent of all contracts. There are, however, still significant differences between the performance of the 26 IT service providers ranked in this year’s study. TCS is ranked first in the overall service provider satisfaction ranking with a score of 80 percent, followed by Computacenter and Getronics (both at 77 percent) and Cognizant (74 percent). TCS has raised its game by five percent from last year to stay top – in contrast vendors who deliver static performances will fall in the rankings.
More than half of all UK organisations are using, or planning to use, public cloud vendors. The satisfaction with these cloud vendors, such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and SAP is generally high. Growth in the usage of SaaS is significant, almost 85 percent of organisations use some form of SaaS. Even though the volume may differ from organisation to organisation, it is a clear indication that the model itself is well past beyond ‘early adopter’ phase.
The UK study is part of Whitelane’s annual extensive IT outsourcing studies. Whitelane interviews sourcing executives (CIOs/CFOs) about their outsourcing plans and their opinions on service providers. The study is conducted in 14 different European countries and provides a comprehensive overview of the IT outsourcing landscape in each respective country. The survey also shows the main sourcing trends and positions of the main outsourcing service providers based on different key performance indicators (KPIs) in addition to cloud computing and governance trends.
Vassilis Serafeimidis, Head of IT Sourcing at PA Consulting Group, comments on the report findings: “It is interesting to see that there is a return to investing to support the business after years of cost cutting and sweating existing assets during the economic downturn.“The survey shows a rise in the wish to transform new business driven partially by the move to ‘digital everything’. The emphasis on business transformation suggests a strengthening of demand from businesses to deliver upgrade projects that have been held back whilst the investment taps have been turned off, in particular to deliver seamless service across different channels including mobile.
“The findings identify gaps in innovation, proactivity and ability to drive change. Some suppliers are not performing at the levels expected by their clients in areas required to support key drivers. Given the change in focus towards business transformation and focusing on core business, this suggests a need for greater care in supplier selection and contracting rather than relying on ‘more of the same’ from the ‘cost down’ approach that has dominated in recent years.”
