Cost replaces expertise as outsourcing's main driver

The top reason for outsourcing has historically been the need to access new skills, with 44% of respondents citing this in a survey carried out by the firm in 2000. However, five years on, only 19% of survey respondents put this top of the list in Evans’ August survey of nearly 400 enterprise developers.

According to the survey, 33% of respondents expected their companies to increase the use of outsourcing next year, and only 6% of companies expected to decrease their outsourcing. Forty-five percent of respondents indicated that their companies outsource less than a quarter of their development and only 7% said that they outsource more than 50% of their development projects.

"Outsourcing once made use of high level experts to bring particular expertise to a development project but now we're seeing that outsourcing is much more likely to be used to save development costs," said John Andrews, Evans Data's Chief Operating Officer.

"Most companies outsource less than a quarter of their development, most likely lower level programming tasks that are more cost-effective to outsource rather than devoting an in-house programmer to such jobs," he said.

The survey also found that:

• Sixty-one percent of enterprises have increased their IT budgets this year, up from 53% a year ago. Only 10% plan on cutbacks in their IT budgets.
• Larger enterprises hang on to their applications much longer than smaller companies. Forty nine percent of enterprises say they run their applications for more than five years; 29% of small to medium firms will maintain applications this long.
• Almost 60% of enterprise developers intend to use open source code in the next year.
• More than half of enterprise developers, 54%, plan to mobilise business processes to allow remote access to mission-critical applications in real-time.