Due to the demands of Euro single currency and year 2000 projects, Cap Gemini SA says it plans to hire over 2,500 systems engineers between now and the end of 1998. The welcome news for the French economy is also due to market demands for service on integrated software products such as SAP and for internet/Intranet development, said the groups human resources director Xavier Stefani. Meanwhile, a Cap Gemini-International Data Corp study of the European outsourcing market showed a growing demand, with some revealing particularities. Among the 240 companies surveyed, in seven countries, the study found less tendency to outsource all of the information systems activity than a preference for consigning specific applications or services to a third party. Indeed, the percentage of companies planning to outsource all IT activity over the next two years – 16% – has declined with respect to the last two years – 23%. The applications seeing the fastest growth include PC outsourcing (+10%), operational outsourcing (+10%), network outsourcing (+8%) and help desk (+6%). Large systems outsourcing was, on the other hand, down 3%. The study also found that the difficulty in recruiting and retaining highly trained informatics engineers has become an important impetus to using third parties. In particular, companies found it hard to find engineers for new application development (45% of respondents), applications maintenance (35%), support and operation of distributed systems (34%) and application migration (29%).
