Evans Data Corp., which provides market intelligence gleaned from surveys with developers worldwide, released some interesting results a couple of days ago from its 2005 enterprise development survey.
Apparently, five years ago, 44% of respondent companies outsourced development work in order to gain access to special expertise. Only 15% outsourced to reduce costs. Now, only 19% of those companies outsource for the special expertise; and 28% outsource to save money.
Why I find this surprising is because I would have expected the cost savings side to be much higher — now and five years ago. And I would have expected access to special expertise to have started small and shown signs of growth during that same period (as companies grasped the fundamentals of outsourcing and applied it to more than mundane activities).
The same survey reports that 45% of companies represented outsource less than a quarter of their development. A miniscule 7% said they outsource more than 50% of their development projects.
