Outsourcing is recognised as an effective way to curb costs. Rather than expend time, energy and money on getting your own IT infrastructure set up, why not get someone else to do it? This is already being experienced in the ICT industry, through the use of hosting, cloud and managed services. Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, Senegal, and Mauritius, are considered to be primary outsourcing destinations in Africa, and have attracted foreign direct investments from countries like India, UK and the Netherlands. South Africa is leading the outsourcing market across areas such as customer support, financial services, legal administration and other back-office services.
If tying your own shoe laces disrupts your life, there is someone out there that will do it on your behalf – at a price. In the enterprise IT outsourcing market, technology vendors, network operators and system integrators are major service providers in South Africa. Business and knowledge process outsourcing services provide a new means of IT outsourcing, by leveraging emerging technologies such as cloud computing, data centres, and Software as a Service (SaaS). Outsourcing, will not only facilitate the improvement of customer services, through deploying cost-effective IT platforms, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and SaaS, but also reduce Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and Operational Expenditure (OPEX), particularly for service providers with international footprints.
IT and customer support services are fast becoming the most outsourced services by enterprises. These two service categories require outsourcers to procure necessary hardware and software to support the provision of IT systems and contact centres. IT and customer support outsourcing services provide an opportunity for leading telecommunication equipment vendors, such as Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens Networks, Alcatel-lucent, Huawei Technologies, ZTE Corporation, and network operators such as Vodacom, MTN, Airtel and Orange, to provide network infrastructure, hardware, software and devices required in the outsourced enterprise IT systems. These companies have one thing in common – they specialise in infrastructure development and enterprise communication networking services, such as cloud computing and managed services.
Tying shoe laces may seem like an easy task, but what if you needed the knot to look like a butterfly, with one wing slightly larger than the other? Firms that require specialised services have a higher propensity to outsource. IT outsourcing is becoming popular as new emerging trends such as unified communications, managed services, cloud computing (i.e. hosted data centres) and enterprise mobile applications arise as new solutions to assist enterprises in reducing OPEX. Nevertheless, the deployment of such solutions requires significant investments in network infrastructure in order to build new systems and/or integrate them into existing IT architecture of enterprises. IT outsourcing (i.e. managed/hosted IT services) is, therefore, a unique and innovative area to generate new revenue streams for channel partners, including internet service providers (ISPs), system integrators and network operators.
