OUTSOURCING
Strategic Sourcing
Butler Group believes that strategic sourcing, the contracting out of business services to a third-party, has reached a stage where every organisation must evaluate its potential benefits, and is likely to gain significant benefit by adopting sourcing as an integral part of its business strategy. This report addresses the three key areas of IT sourcing - the extended Service Provider (xSP) market, the outsourcing of specific IT facilities on a bespoke basis, and off-shoring - the use of an organisation with overseas workers to deliver an IT solution.
As business processes become increasingly deconstructed, the organisation must focus on its core competencies, where it can truly add value. For non-core processes, the capital costs, skills retention, and associated risks can be devolved to a provider with expertise in that area, allowing the organisation to concentrate on improving its primary business activities. The quality and choice of and from third-party providers has improved dramatically, and technology now enables a more efficient delivery of external IT services.
The xSP Market
The xSP market offers many different types of service, ranging from application provision, network services, Web-site hosting, storage services, and Internet access, to more specialised services such as infrastructure management, security services and wireless application delivery. There are few businesses that do not already consume some of these services, and Butler Group predicts that the world-wide xSP market (excluding network service provision) will grow from US$7 billion in 2001 to US$26 billion by 2005.
The Application Service Provider (ASP) market in particular has underperformed in comparison to the hype that was initially generated. Butler Group notes, however, that most of the major software and infrastructure vendors (including MicrosoftMicrosoft, IBMIBM, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, and Sun) are now developing a strategy for delivering software as a service, and we believe that this market will mature considerably over the next four years. Alles zu IBM auf CIO.de Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de