CIO —

Two major trends led to lower prices for outsourced IT services last year—the global economic downturn and the uptick in remote infrastructure management (RIM) adoption.

With the financial picture still far from clear and companies remaining interested in offshoring and remote infrastructure management to save money, outsourcing prices this year should follow a similar—if less dramatic—path downward, according to first quarter IT service price analysis from ProBenchmark, the pricing subsidiary of outsourcing consultancy Alsbridge.

"How long the economy will be like this and how long client companies will continue to more aggressively [offshore] infrastructure remains to be seen," says Chris Pattacini, ProBenchmarks's director. "It is clear that RIM will continue to proliferate in the market, continuing that downward price pressure, but not as much as last year."

Another factor causing outsourcing prices to drop is contract renegotiation, according to ProBenchmark's Howard Davies. He says clients are responding to tough times by renegotiating with their vendors on price.

"That's creatively pulling the price of services down," says Davies. Consequently, when other customers benchmark their own deals, they're more likely to find they're paying more for IT services than the benchmark, and that encourages them to reexamine their deals with their providers. "The longer they wait, it seems the larger the opportunity is," he adds.

Pricing Outlook for Specific IT Services

Desktop services, the prices for which had been dropping 10 to 14 percent annually, should fall another seven to 10 percent this year, according to ProBenchmark. Help desk prices, which had been decreasing five to seven percent a year, may fall three to six percent this year.

Only storage prices are on track to continue their 10 to 14 percent annual declines, in part because the hardware itself continues to get cheaper and because less expensive labor is now being exploited more extensively offshore. (Labor accounts for more than half of storage costs.)

Still, as in 2009, some of these so-called lower IT service prices may be higher than they appear. IT service providers have been actively disaggregating services to protect their profit margins. The price for desktop services today may be 20 percent less than two years ago, but the definition of desktop services has narrowed.

"You end up with what I call with "skinny" solutions," says ProBenchmark's Pattacini. "An onshore provider's desktop support solution may be more like what we'd call field services back in the day, while offshore providers try to deliver as much as possible through the service desk."

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