I just ran across a bunch of reports and predictions that show offshore outsourcing on the rise. Most of these reports are about large companies but one article in CIO Insight says it’s time for the small and medium sized businesses to take a serious look at outsourcing too.

There were several mentions and an article in eWeek covering the availability of a new report from the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) which give the results of a survey of 114 software companies. The report was sponsored by Symphony Services, an outsourcing service provider themselves. Actually, this sounds like a clever way for Symphony to make contact many prospects during the course of the survey.

The report showed 88 percent report a positive impact on profits. In addition, 84 percent of the survey respondents mentioned growth strategy as an “important” driver for offshoring, with speed to market and productivity as the next most important drivers.

But then the survey reports “about half of them worked with an offshore provider, one-third said they operate an offshore subsidiary, and about one-fourth of the respondents said they use a hybrid model of both approaches.” Clearly it is the bigger companies that will have an offshore subsidiary. Does this mean the survey is skewed towards larger companies? Are there similar statistics for small software companies? It’s not clear.

Another article in eWeek reports that 72 percent of CIOs say they intended to increase their spending with external service providers in 2007.

So everyone is outsourcing and most are going offshore. And that CIO Insight article says you small & medium sized businesses need to catch up.

The kind of information delivered by these reports and articles is interesting. However, see the next issue of my Runtime eZine, also published on the Accelerance blog, for a discussion of the kind of information needed most by small companies interested in offshore outsourcing.

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