Major survey of UK businesses reveals growing trend for IT outsourcing to UK-based suppliers.
PeoplePerHour.com – Europe’s biggest online business marketplace – today revealed the first results from a survey of its 50,000+ business users.
The survey revealed that 60 percent of UK businesses are outsourcing more now than they did two years ago – largely due to the recession, which prompted many businesses to outsource in order to cut costs and reduce in-house staff numbers.
More surprising was the revelation that 61 percent of businesses are now choosing to outsource their IT requirements to local suppliers instead of cheaper overseas alternatives.
This survey finding is corroborated by PeoplePerHour.com’s research into the buying behaviour of its users – detailed in the PPH Economy (http://www.peopleperhour.com/pph_economy.php) – which shows that only 6.9 percent of businesses award projects to the lowest bidders.
“You might have expected offshoring to grow through the recession as UK businesses looked to cut costs by outsourcing IT requirements to cheaper overseas suppliers,” says PeoplePerHour.com founder Xenios Thrasyvoulou. “However, responses to our survey and analysis of transactions on the site points to one conclusion: outsourcing is growing and offshoring is falling.”
The fall in offshoring is partly attributable to recent rise of the UK’s ‘freelance economy’ and the growing availability of skilled IT professionals offering their services on a freelance basis.
In the recession, many individuals who were made redundant from an in-house IT role turned to freelancing instead of re-entering the job market. This merely accelerated a trend that was emerging before the recession, however. New technologies like PeoplePerHour.com and widespread broadband have been making freelancing an increasingly viable and attractive option for many years now.
According to PeoplePerHour.com’s survey, 41 percent of respondents currently outsource IT requirements – more than any other service category on the site (Marketing & PR is second with 29 percent).
The data paints a positive picture for the UK IT industry. “With more businesses choosing to outsource to UK-based suppliers than ever before, prospects for the UK IT industry are very rosy indeed,” says Thrasyvoulou.
