"There has, for example, been a massive downturn for the professional consulting and system integration areas with financial services companies and telecoms in particular cutting back their spending," IDC analyst James Weir, told ElectricNews.Net. "However, e-government services are growing fast and this is an opportunity that IT service providers cannot afford to miss out on."
The IDC study showed though that different countries will have different levels of needs. For instance, the UK and Germany have fallen behind Finland, France, Spain and Italy in the sophistication of their e-government activities, and are also trailing Nordic countries in their readiness for e-government. Ireland was not examined in the study.
IDC also pointed out that Western European government are struggling to trade-off budget constraints with the need to improve service sophistication. However, if they are to meet the demands of the EU's eEurope strategy, which calls for government services to be brought on-line by 2005 at the latest, then they need to invest in hardware and software applications, supported by service professionals in designing, implementing, managing, and updating those solutions, IDC said.
"Central and local governments are up against it to meet their targets, so they are looking to roll out their initiatives as quickly as possible," commented Weir.
This need will continue to benefit large IT service vendors with well-established customer relationships and global brands, said IDC. And some national strongholds, such as EDS' leadership in the UK, will remain. However, it also predicted that local companies like IT Telecom in Italy and TietoEnator in the Nordics, will grow rapidly both as partners of global companies and as major vendors, particularly in the local government segment.
However, while IDC's forecast will be welcomed by the IT services industry, another research firm has said the sector will show only low levels of overall growth in 2003. IDC rival Gartner Dataquest said that 2003 will be only a slight improvement on 2002, which was one of the most difficult years for the sector. It recently predicted that worldwide IT services revenue will reach USD556.8 billion in 2002, a 2.8 percent increase from the 2001 level of USD541.9 billion. In 2003, worldwide revenue is projected to reach USD591.4 billion, up 6.2 percent from 2002.
Spending in Western Europe will grow from USD150.2 billion in 2002 to USD157.1 in 2003. Gartner added that outsourcing of both IT management and process management will continue to grow faster than consulting services and development and integration services in 2003.
Quelle: Electric News
