Welcome to the new year of 2011. This time of the year is usually the point for many companies to leave the past behind in order to enthusiastically engage in new, promising projects or to even renew outdated business practices and strategies. Orienting on the future for a new start, however, also means to look back and reflect of past years’ major developments and trends. This article reviews the current status quo of the global IT industry and outlines the recently upcoming major players, innovations and developments one still has to count on in 2011.

The first decade of the twenty first century was marked by an ongoing global recession that peaked in the financial and economic crisis. As hard as this crisis hit economies worldwide, innovative ICTs remained to be a key driver of growth.  Companies that were forced to optimize their processes in order to survive on the rough and highly competitive market often turned to the IT sector in order to find better, more effective solutions. Especially IT outsourcing locations such as China and India emerged as major players on the IT market, over the past two decades.

Outsourcing represents a significant industry that contributes to the GDP of the global economy. Recent research institutes such as NASSCOM, Everest Group and Forrester expect this particular industry to grow exponentially over the upcoming years. Especially in the US, the value of outsourcing is recognized by the government and numerous companies who already outsourced parts of their services to an external provider. According to the president Barak Obama, after an official visit to India at the end of last year, outsourcing “is not just a one-way street of American jobs and companies moving to India. It is a dynamic, two-way relationship that is creating jobs, growth, and higher living standards.”

Nevertheless, besides offshore outsourcing, more and more US-based companies decide to use the advantages of near shoring. Latest research results from the BDO Technology Outlook Survey 2011 by a US based accounting and consulting organization reveals that US companies heavily count on the trend of near shoring in the future. 58% of the survey respondents indicate that their future plans on outsourcing activities will involve merely companies that are on the same continent. This article provides an overview on the near shoring industry in the Americas.

Outsourced IT service supply chains nowadays often involve multiple providers. This strategy is called multi-sourcing and gets increasingly adopted due to a greater market fragmentation in the IT outsourcing industry, offering a growing number of different services, solutions and platforms.  Buyer companies often strategically divide their IT solutions into different assignments that are operated by different providers. Multi-sourcing is an emerging trend that sounds promising, but is it always recommendable to manage multiple providers simultaneously? This article provides the advantages and pitfalls of multi-sourcing and highlights how buyers can gain the best ROI from multiple outsourcing partnerships.

Offshore outsourcing is a truly global business strategy. Buyer companies benefit the most from outsourcing engagements if they get access to resources, infrastructure and technologies that they might not be able to access at home. In fact, the outsourcing sector is on the march, no matter if you seek an offshore service provider in the Philippines, Russia, Brazil or India. Global offshore services range from business process outsourcing over information technology outsourcing to call center outsourcing. Contradictory, this great range of service providers and services in any imaginable geographic location bears a challenge for outsourcing buyers: What is the best outsourcing country? This article offers help for the undecided and provides them with the newest rankings of the best offshore outsourcing countries worldwide.

In the North Western part of the globe, many companies discover the benefits of outsourcing and start to locate parts of their service production to a third party provider. This can take the form of offshore outsourcing, which is the relocation of service development from in-house to an external service provider, usually on another continent. On the other hand, some companies prefer not having to reach that far, choosing to work with a provider who is not more than two time zones away from home. This growing type of outsourcing is called near shoring and represents a widely adopted sourcing strategy in the European Union. This article provides information on the European near shoring industry.