Back office functions which are not core to a company’s main business focuses, namely accounting, HR and payroll, contact management and ICT services are still the subject of rapidly growing interest in terms of managed services, even in this faltering economy, according to experts.
Neil Wisdom, sales and marketing director, Complete Telecom made the point that “Outsourcing hasn’t changed a whole lot over the last couple of years, although the number of companies offering the same services has increased. As a result, some of the suppliers are finding that economies of scale are harder to achieve, as the overall market is being spread over a much larger number of small, medium and large service providers.
“Primary functions being outsourced also include network and systems management (LAN, WAN telecoms, helpdesk, servers); desktop support (hardware and OS); and applications support (database, CRM and customer specific business applications).”
Senior product manager with Magnet, Joe Lavin commented that most businesses today “already have their website and e-mail services outsourced to a third party”. However, he added that Magnet are also see traction with regards to uptake in the outsourcing of CRM and accounting tools, such as Salesforce and Sage. “These clients aren’t making a conscious decision to outsource these applications. It is only with improvements in broadband that SMEs can now avail of systems and services that were, to date, cost-prohibitive,” he added.
CLOUD COMPUTING
Sogeti Ireland’s CEO, Declan Kavanagh, said that, at present, Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing “are gathering momentum” in outsourcing sphere because “the value proposition removes major up front investment and pay as you go matches costs to usage or revenues”. He adds, “Also, SaaS provides cost effective access to rich functionality that would otherwise not be justified for example Salesforce and Microsoft Online where, in effect, your desktop core suite of productivity tools are hosted and managed by a third party.”
Brian Hurley, director of outsourcing services with HP also made the point that, “Most of the activity we’re seeing in terms of outsourcing and managed services at the moment would be in the infrastructural brief, there’s nothing new as such. There’s a lot of talk about cloud computing and I expect further inroads in that area.”
Kavanagh also pointed to areas such as “website and some application hosting”,
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