The good news: For the first time two India companies—Infosys and Wipro - figure in the list of top 10 IT services outsourcers of choice in a survey of 134 North American customers. The middling news: IT budgets are no longer falling and will see stable or slight growth in 2003. The bad news: Large number of services portfolios are getting commoditized and pricing pressure will continue through the year.

Forrester Research’s recent TechStrategy report on ‘Ser-vices Market Sizing through 2007’, is a mixed bag of prognostication for the industry. Christine Ferussi Ross and team conducted a survey among vice-presidents, IT directors and business unit decision-makers a t145 North American firms last quarter. The idea was to understand demand for two distinct classes of offerings in 2003 and beyond: consulting, system integration and IT outsourcing services.

Exceptions aside, mega-deals are not really the fad of the moment. Growth will be driven by the need to integrate existing applications or from pent-up demand because of investments withheld in 2002. Little over 50% of those interviewed said they would spend less than $10 million on outsourcing this year.

Bottomline findings
n 97% of respondents said they would be buying consulting and SI services during the year. Of these, 41% are likely to increase their spend from 2002 levels.

n 92% said they will buy new IT outsourcing services in 2003. Of these 37% said their budgets would increase. Compare this with 54% in February last year who’d said their spend would actually decrease. The more interesting story, however, lies in where exactly that IT spend is set to go.

Within those numbers
While most companies have promised higher spends the bigger growth is likely to come from outsourcing projects than just consulting and SI services.

According the report IT consulting is expected to grow about 5.5% this year with a compound aggregate growth ratio of about 6% till 2007. This would mostly be led by business process consulting with change management also piggybacking on BPC growth.

System integration services are also likely to grow by just over 5% during the year with a 6% projected CAGR by 2007. This will largely be led by growth in application integration services as customers seek to knit together various existing applications.

Some of the AI spend will also be influenced by the movement toward web services. Custom application development will grow at a more sedate 3.4% during the year and a CAGR of 6% till 2007.

The good news for Indian vendors it that IT outsourcing will remain a key growth area. In 2002 outsourcing accounted for about 47% of the entire IT Services budget. According to Forrester this is likely to grow by a CAGR of 14% till 2007 and will by then account for 55% of the entire IT services budget or about $184 billion.

IT outsourcing growth will be driven by the continuing thrust in application outsourc-ing. Though most customers stated this as their priority area, longer sales cycle might lead to relatively slow growth this year. However, the study believes over the next five years, application outsourcing is likely to show a phenomenal CAGR of 50% and will be the fasted growing portfolio.

There is, however, a catch.

According to Forrester RESEARCH, overall IT services spend is expected to go up by 8% in 2003 and show a CAGR of 10% through 2007. About 80% of the firms interviewed said they would maintain or increase their services spend budget this year.

Bigger budgets, but smaller deals
Despite market perceptions to the contrary, the study states that this is not really the year or era of mega-deals. Customers will spend more, but they will most likely parcel out the work in smaller modules to multiple vendors. At the moment for instance, customers use an average of four to five outsourcing vendors. While this may consolidate somewhat, the sizes of individual deals will not be large. This will in turn require higher sales and marketing spend by Indian companies. Some like Infosys have already witnessed this phenomenon reporting an increasing number of smaller deals at a time when their sales and marketing spend has almost doubled.

Guess what? Price is more important than ever before. When asked about the two most important criterion for outsourcing, more than half the respondents said "price". Compare this with only 25% stressing on price in a similar survey in February, 2002. Key: Billing rates may not be falling, but they still matter the most.

Much of this will be due to the fact that 2003 spend will be driven either by improvement to existing systems or due to pent-up demand for investments companies held back on last year. For instance, the study says less than one-fourth of the customers are likely to purchase an ERP solution next year. Most work would be either incremental changes or minor enhancements.

In addition, "Risk aversion is rampant," says the report. That will affect investments in both leading edge technologies and the willingness to try start-up vendors. As a result, middle- and small-level companies will come under increasing pressure.

The most significant thing is the continuing stress on pricing. Though billing rates seem to have finally hit the bottom and are not likely to decrease further, customer obsession with pricing continues. Of all those survey 52% said price would be their main criterion – compared with only 25% who stressed on price in a similar study done in February, 2002.

While five-year projections are always suspect in the services business, the news for Indian IT services providers in this year at least is—growth is imminent, but it will require a lot more effort as individual deals will be smaller, and price still matters.

Sarita Rani

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