TheInfoPro Wave 1: IBM, HCL, Wipro, and HP emerge as clear leaders in IMS sourcing market
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/14/2007 3:50:00 PM
TheInfoPro (TIP), an independent research network and leading supplier of market intelligence for the IT industry, now offers its inaugural study of the infrastructure management services (IMS) sourcing market.
Research gathered indicates 85 percent of Global 2000 organizations currently using IMS sSourcing—or that are considering using it—plan to spend more on IMS sourcing. Only 4 percent plan to spend less throughout the remainder of 2007 and into 2008. Based on the interview responses, the service provider poised to benefit most from this added spending is IBM, followed by Tata (Tata Consulting Services), Wipro, HP, and HCL.
"As relationships with current outsourcing providers stabilize and mature, most organizations are renewing their contracts and planning to spend more of their budgets on outsourcing additional infrastructure services, and in particular within the areas of Storage and Servers," said Robert Stevenson, Managing Director of Sourcing at TheInfoPro. "Surprisingly, the decision to outsource more services is not being reached solely on a cost-cutting basis. It is also based on the fact that organizations are given access to an expanded talent pool, as well as an increased ability to standardize the technologies being used within the organization."
Also of note in Wave 1 of the IMS Sourcing Study, 80 percent of those organizations using outsourced services indicate that the transition to the external sourcing provider met expectations—a strong factor that is taken into consideration when organizations consider providers for additional services.
The top five providers most frequently mentioned as being in use and in consideration (combined) are: IBM, HCL, Wipro, HP, and Tata. However, IBM, HCL, Wipro, and HP hold a commanding lead over all of the others.
Evident leaders were also indicated within each of the functionalities being outsourced:
Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity: Wipro and Tata
Storage: HP
Security: HCL
Networking: HCL
Server and Desktop Management: IBM
"Vendor performance ratings are of great interest in the study, with results including detailed spending, satisfaction ratings, and vulnerability data," said Robert Stevenson. "In the first wave of the study, none of the providers rated well in terms of 'retention of staff.' Retention is a key battleground that will only become a bigger challenge as more companies look to use IMS sourcing."
A hallmark of TIP research is the narrative commentary that is captured during the course of the interviews. With regard to staff retention, the following comment from an IT pro at an F1000 Industrial / Manufacturing company best exemplifies current sentiment: "About retention, if...companies have anybody more than a couple of years, it seems to be a rarity. They have a lot of their own churn trying to satisfy individual demands."
The Study
Completed in conjunction with Evangelists, a New Delhi-based provider of research, advisory, and strategic consulting services to the IT Industry, TheInfoPro's IMS Sourcing Study is based on more than 100 in-depth interviews with Sourcing and Infrastructure decision-makers within Global 2000 corporations in the U.S., India, and Europe. The interviews focus on the use of external Sourcing providers for the management of core functions within IT infrastructure - Servers, Storage, Security, Networking, Desktop, and Help Desk. Intelligence is captured about budgets, roadmaps for functions, technologies that are currently being outsourced or that are being considered for outsourcing, along with detailed ratings of the Sourcing provider landscape.
"The Sourcing market is a natural for TIP's demand-side research" said Ken Male, TIP's CEO and Founder. "The three primary constituencies we work with - IT Pros, Investors, and Technology & Service providers - have been asking us to get inside this burgeoning market via our research process, which is based on one-on-one interviews with the world's largest buyers and users of Information Technology. Sourcing complements the existing IT sectors that we have been investigating since 2002 - Storage, Servers, Networking, and Information Security."
