Cost has dramatically overtaken experience as the main
driver for application development outsourcing.
Only 19% of the 400 enterprise-level developers surveyed by US
market Intelligence Company Evans Data Corporation said they
outsource to gain access to special expertise - a substantial drop
from 44% five years ago. Some 28% noted cost savings as the chief
reason to outsource, up from 15% in 2000.
“Outsourcing once made use of high-level experts to bring
particular expertise to a development project, but we are seeing
that outsourcing is much more likely to be used to save development
costs,” says John Andrews, Evans Data Corporation’s chief operating
officer.
The outsourcing juggernaut will continue to gain pace, with 33%
of respondents expecting their companies to increase their
dependency on outsourcing. But companies only outsource less than
25% of their development and use it primarily for lower level
programming tasks.
