WASHINGTON, DC—US enterprises plan to increasingly address IT services needs in-house or through partnering with a US vendor, according to a new survey from Clutch, a B2B research and review platform. Half of the 582 IT decision-makers surveyed in this research indicate that they are trending toward using more in-house resources for IT services in 2017.
In addition, nearly 80% of enterprises that outsource their IT needs say they are trending toward hiring domestic providers over offshore firms in 2017, Clutch said in a statement.
The decision whether to use in-house resources rather than outsource IT services to an external vendor may depend on the priority of that IT need to a company. As IT functions become increasingly critical to the operation of the enterprise, many decision-makers want more control over how these functions are managed, thus prefer to keep IT work in-house.
“If you think of types of more specialized work like mobility, I think organizations are going to try to do it themselves and have that control,” said Mike Hughes, Founder of Outsystems, an Atlanta-based low-code platform developer.
Still, the study found a majority of enterprises (75%) rely on third-party vendors for IT services. For this group, procuring the ideal provider for IT needs involves weighing the advantages and risks of domestic and offshore providers.
Quality of service and communication, identified by respondents as the two primary benefits of partnering with domestic service providers, factor into the recent trend toward domestic providers.
Domestic and offshore resources, though, are not mutually exclusive resources. In fact, offshoring remains a popular IT procurement strategy among enterprise. According to the study, only 22% are unlikely to use an offshore IT vendor in the future.
One reason offshore vendors have retained staying power among enterprises can be attributed to the value to they provide their clients through cost savings, particularly compared to domestic firms. Enterprises identified ‘value’ as the primary benefit of offshore resources, while ‘cost’ is the biggest challenge of partnering with a domestic firm.
