More companies will move their IT servers back home

Read the full article in Finansavisen

Several Norwegian companies want to take their IT services back in house. Greater control and faster IT development are some of the reasons.

PA Consulting has, in collaboration with the research organisation Whitelane Research, carried out a customer satisfaction survey based on over 1,400 outsourcing contracts in the Nordic region.

One of the most important findings in this year's survey is that Norwegian companies will to a greater extent take more of their IT activity back in house in the future. As many as 18 per cent of Norwegian companies said that they will "insource" more in the next two years, compared with 13 per cent in last year's survey.

More and more companies now want to move their IT services back into their own business. With your IT systems far from home, you can become more vulnerable, and many felt this during the corona crisis, says Knut Erlend Vik, financial services expert at PA Consulting.

Even so, the majority will either outsource as before, or more, the survey shows. According to the respondents, the three most important reasons for more outsourcing are the need for scalability, wanting to concentrate on the core business and needing access to resources with IT expertise.

At the opposite end, those who say they want to reduce outsourcing, state their reasons as faster project implementation and better quality, the need to build and protect their own intellectual property rights, as well as working closely and quickly in development groups with suppliers.

It is a bit surprising that so many people plan to insource IT services, even though that has been a trend in both the Nordics and the UK in recent years, says Vik.

In the company satisfaction rankings, Tietoevry comes last. What counts against Tietoevry is that the company is assessed on very many contracts, and the IT service company also has several older contracts in their portfolio that probably pull their scores down.

PA Consulting's report also shows that Norwegian customers are most satisfied with suppliers, with an average customer satisfaction of 76 per cent, while Denmark has the lowest average at 71 per cent.

Within the category of cloud services, companies are ranked in two different subcategories, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). In the infrastructure category, Microsoft Azure is ahead of Amazon Web Services (AWS). In the software category, Microsoft Office 365 is top with Salesforce in second place.