Survey Finds Outsourcing Growing

Consulting firm Bluewolf published the results of a survey that concludes that IT departments are on a pace to increase their expenses for outsourcing.

According to the company, 32 percent of respondents said they intend to grow the outsourcing investments over the next 12 to 18 months, driven by a desire to improve productivity and profitability, access to experts and a flexibility to take advantages on demand. 48 percent of the respondents said they will hire more contractors than full-time staff.

Strong areas of outsourcing include infrastructure services, with 62 percent of organizations falling into this category and application services (73 percent). 35 percent of the outsourcing budget is spent on infrastructure, and 48 percent on applications. The majority of infrastructure services is tied to data center operations (23 percent) and the lion's share of application services goes toward application development investments (46 percent). Half of all CIOs said that they allocate between 10 and 25 percent of their overall budget to outsourcing.

The full results can be found on Bluewolf's Web site.

Market research firm Gartner recently estimated that the global spending on outsourcing will top $250 billion this year.

Wolfgang Gruener is a contributor to Tom's IT Pro. He is currently principal analyst at Ndicio Research, a market analysis firm that focuses on cloud computing and disruptive technologies, and maintains the conceivablytech.com blog. An 18-year veteran in IT journalism and market research, he previously published TG Daily and was managing editor of Tom's Hardware news, which he grew from a link collection in the early 2000s into one of the most comprehensive and trusted technology news sources.

See here for all of Wolfgang's Tom's IT Pro articles.