Global outsourcing industry finishes 2015 with a bang, says ISG
Monday, January 18, 2016
The Information Services Group (ISG) has published this past week the Outsourcing Index for Q4 of 2015 - a quarterly review of the latest sourcing industry data and trends. The report unveils a strong last quarter performance for the global outsourcing industry, which hit a four-year high total annual contract value (ACV) this quarter, in spite of a disappointing 2015 overall performance. The Index, which only accounts for outsourcing contracts worth $5m or more annually, shows that the global industry’s ACV for Q4 rose five percent to $7bn. The ISG attributes the positive result to the closing of nine megadeals valued at more than $100m since last September. The strong performance of the industry in the last months of 2015 was not enough to reverse a weak first semester. In spite of a two percent increase in the number of contracts signed, up to a record 1445, 2015 saw a decline in the total ACV of the industry of more than eight percent to $23.7bn. The ISG singled out the decline in the total value of ITO contracts by 12 percent or $2bn this past year as the leading cause for the year’s dismal performance. This decline is attributed to more and more companies moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud. The report also shows that apart from a handful of large deals, the trend is for contracts to be worth less and for an increase in the volume contracts. According to John Keppel, president of ISG, “The data this quarter and this year confirm more enterprises are sourcing than ever before, and they’re paying less for those services, which encourages them to participate in the sourcing market even more”. “They’re buying flexibility with cost variability, utilizing smaller deals more than ever as they revamp their processes around cloud, digitalization and automation. Outsourcing continues to have a strong value proposition as we exit 2015 and enter 2016”, he continues. It is not the first year that the global outsourcing ACV has deteriorated; the industry has seen a consistent yearly decline of ACV over the past decade - between 2012 and 2015 alone the average ACV declined by 20 percent. Average contract duration has also decreased in recent years; between 2012 and 2015 contract duration fell by 15 per cent, coming up to 3.5 years in 2015. Europe, the world’s largest outsourcing market, had a strong Q4 performance with ACV rising 17 percent to $3.9bn. However, similar to the global trend, ACV fell by eight percent to $11.7bn in 2015 overall after a dismal first semester performance. As for the UK, the industry’s ACV for the region fell by 19 percent to its lowest since 2009. Similar to the rest of the world, contract volume reached a new high. Curated from: http://www.sourcingfocus.com/site/newsitem/9097/
