During all crisis years, IT outsourcing, unlike the overwhelming number of other segments of the Russian economy, shows steady growth – both in terms of share in the overall structure of IT services and financial indicators: from 46 billion rubles – in 2011 to 76, 2 billion rubles – in 2015. In 2017, analysts expect the continuation of this trend.

According to experts, such a picture is due to general trends in the development of the IT industry.

Outsourcing is the answer to the customer’s request «how to get the service cheaper: by the internal staff or by purchasing from the outside?». Own staff, it would seem, provides more effective quality control and service speed. Working with outsourcers requires other skills: the so-called. functions of «customer service», and this is not the IT sphere. However, at the same time, the company gets access to expensive and experienced specialists, who are not always justified to be kept  on a permanent basis. Also there are often problems with the search for such specialists – there are not enough real masters for all.

The instability of the economic situation makes it necessary to optimize the budgets for IT development and concentrate on improving the efficiency of the existing infrastructure, reducing the cost of ownership and quality support. The statistics show that more than 60% of Russian companies today already use the services of IT outsourcing. If several years ago external experts were assigned technical tasks exclusively, today the interest shifts to complex and more complicated contracts of IaaS type, including support, consulting and even tasks to increase the profitability of business – the so-called. gain sharing. Customer requests are gradually evolving. From «I do everything myself», through the stages «supply (consumables)» and «supply + service», to full-fledged IaaS-cooperation with the IT contractor in the «supply + service + equipment» format.

«The outsourcing service, for example, of office printing helps the company not only reduce printing costs by 30 to 50%, but also creates an optimal managed printing environment functioning in the organization’s working mode without the participation of organization’semployees of the organization,» notes the general director of the GC “IT Systems” Vladislav Siver. – Our task is to «unload» the Customer’s specialists, to give an open picture, where every ruble invested in the printed infrastructure and this structure is optimized. Now, developing the first Russian printing platform, we are developing a fundamentally new approach to corporate printing as such. The essence of the approach is to offer the customer not devices, consumables or services, but the ability to obtain a certain number of prints. This is similar to the subscription to the software – you pay for a month and during the paid period all the functions are at your disposal. We take care of all the worries to ensure this possibility. The customer does not need to think about changing cartridges, maintenance and so on. In the platform itself, service monitoring will be built in, which will ensure obtaining information about the state of the fleet of devices in order to ensure the continuity of its operation.»

In the structure of orders for IT outsourcing, the lion’s share of large projects still falls on the public sector, financial, energy and telecommunications companies. Although many market players distinguish, as a new trend for Russia, outsourcing the management of IT infrastructure in small and medium-sized businesses. Customers are increasingly interested in higher-level services: infrastructure cloud services, ensuring the availability of the application part, increasing the maturity of IT processes, etc. The end of warranty periods for servicing existing corporate equipment contributes to this trend, which leads to the inevitable conclusion of additional service contracts. Outside the guarantee, the infrastructure becomes expensive and outsourcing with the provision of equipment for temporary use is a way out of this situation.

Another trend, which, according to market participants, will determine the development of IT outsourcing in the near future, is a clear attraction to work with one contractor that can provide solutions to all the tasks of the client. And more and more customers prefer to build relationships with the outsourcer on a long-term basis. In the framework of such a contract, all the participants in the process are sure of the future, and this is very valuable in an unstable economic reality.