With China showing a pullback and mixed US economic indicators that are tracking slowly up, IT executives are starting to get out of their fox holes, survey the damage and begin to act vs. react to the needs of the business. Here in TD we are beginning to see a bit of a “thaw” in the frozen budgets and spend in IT organizations.
The thawing is beginning to be seen in some of the smaller more Agile companies with some signs of life in the larger enterprise space. The landscape has changed dramatically but there is a movement away from “slash and burn” spending reductions to targeted revenue generation. IT staffs have been cut as deep as possible with little to no room for additional spending reductions. Pent-up demand is being unleashed on the CIOs and their teams. The result is pressure on resources and utilization. More and more executives will be looking for tactical outsourcing opportunities. Two key areas we are seeing movement around is effective use of mobile/smartphone technology and business critical - time to market sensitive – projects. The demand on technology companies that provide these services is to bring to bear high-end resources at a competitive price. This usually involves on-shore/near-shore resources with off-shore capabilities (SE Asia appears to be the next major hub for off-shore). This “Right Shoring” philosophy provides the “near to the business” presence necessary for today’s rapid development processes with the competitive cost savings of a pure off-shore team.
Highly targeted initiatives with aggressive deliverables will be the name of the game as companies settle in with limited resources, budgets and overwhelming demand.