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.
