Insights on Business Intelligence Outsourcing in European Markets

Back in February, Gartner estimated that the business intelligence and analytics market would reach $18.3 billion in 2017, a 7.3% increase over 2016. With that in mind, we’ve decided to create a study on how several European countries approach this topic, and what their stance is on business intelligence outsourcing.

How Does Switzerland Handle Business intelligence Outsourcing?

The smallest member of the DACH region, which is comprised of Germany (Deutschland), Austria and Switzerland (Confederatio Helvetica), may be more reserved and may give medium to medium-high importance to business intelligence trends such as agile BI, data governance, cloud BI, data as a service (DaaS), data discovery and data storytelling, but it starts to view outsourcing as an opportunity to access quality talent. That seems to be an issue in this country, especially since it’s estimated that by 2020 there will be 22,000 unstaffed IT jobs.

Switzerland is becoming more open to outsourcing, mainly because of the reduced costs of this practice, combined with the high costs of domestic IT personnel. In general, Swiss companies prefer long-term collaborations, with most companies having outsourced software development or IT tasks for more than 3 years.

Will Belgium’s Stance on Outsourcing Change Anytime Soon?

In Belgium, companies are open to outsourcing their software development, but not when it comes to new players, who might have a hard time entering the market. Business partnerships are often the result of long-term relationships or networking.

Since nearshoring is preferred, Belgian companies are more likely to choose Western European partners, and even then, the outsourced projects are small in budget and complexity.

On a brighter note, the public sector is the main buyer of IT projects. To win an auction for a larger project, companies usually partner up with one another. This is something we might also witness in the outsourcing scene soon enough.

Is Outsourcing to the Nordics Challenging at All?

The Nordics have a continuously growing outsourcing market that’s driven by the focus on core business and by access to resources. Judging by the mostly positive past experiences (91%) of the companies from this area, there’s no reason they wouldn’t keep outsourcing.

In terms of investments, Nordic companies focus both on Business Intelligence solutions and on people with the right abilities, so that they make the most out of this. Combine that with the engaging Danish business landscape and with the open-mindedness of Swedish companies and you’ll understand why these countries are a very attractive option for outsourcing companies. While Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and SAP reign supreme over the Swedish software market, they focus on specific niches, which enabled local companies to also acquire a good position.

Unfortunately, it’s not all rosy for the Nordic countries. In the spring of 2016, as many as 30% of Danish companies experienced unsuccessful recruiting, which in turn led to 15,600 unstaffed positions. That’s an excellent opportunity for outsourcing companies, as they could supply this demand easily with high-quality services at reasonable prices. As for the challenges that the outsourcing companies themselves could experience, there’s the high sensitivity to price, the high number of IT companies (around 34,000) and the long B2B sales cycle.

Want to find out more on what these and other European countries think of outsourcing companies? Stay tuned, as we are currently putting the finishing touches to our study on this topic and we will make it available to the whole world as soon as it’s ready! In the meantime, if you’ve found value in this blog post, don’t hesitate to share it on social media with anyone who might benefit from it!