Cloud 9

The US IT services market will return to its pre-downturn growth rate of 5% in 2010, going by the strong IT hardware demand seen in the last two quarters, Forrester Research has predicted. The $85 billion US IT services market had shrunk 5% in 2009, affecting the growth rate of the $40 billion Indian IT and outsourcing industry. “The cutbacks in tech purchases were in many cases driven by fear. Fear that the economy was headed toward a multiyear recession... and fear that firms would not be able to borrow from banks or the credit market if they needed, resulting in the drive to hoard cash and slash capital investment... As fears ease and prices rebound, the pent-up demand in those industries for IT goods and services will bounce back in 2010,” Forrester said in its report on the US IT industry last week. The strongest segment in IT services will continue to be IT consulting, which grew even in 2009 as companies struggled to cut IT costs, followed by hardware support and system integrat

In a Sourcing team meeting at a client I recently worked for, a senior Sourcing Manager lamented that instead of “Sourcing” they were merely consolidating suppliers. A pretty insightful statement! And it is true for many organizations where the central focus of “Sourcing” is just to achieve greater volume leverage during negotiations, and using that leverage to get a better purchase-price from a subset of incumbent suppliers. This pure ‘purchase-price reduction by supplier consolidation’ approach does have its merits, but is this what sourcing is all about? The best-in-class Sourcing organizations do not think so. For them, Sourcing starts way early, with an analysis of spend by categories, and the creation of a sound organizational sourcing strategy which also places emphasis on factors like cycle times, standardization, compliance etc., rather than just purchase price. This is followed by prioritization of sourcing categories, supplier prospecting, and an RFx process that adheres to