Analysis from Kable shows that spend on IT consulting services remains proportionally lower than spend on other third party services.
This year 16.6 percent of IT services budgets was allocated to IT consultants and contractors.
This figure fell short of the proportion being spent on services such as application development and integration or security and privacy services, which saw 21.2 percent and 18.3 percent respectively.
It was also outsripped by spending on hosting and data centre services and desktop services and user support received 17.7 percent and 17.0 of spend respectively.
According to consultancy.uk, "IT consulting excludes repeatable services (distinguishing it from the IT industry) and outsourced services."
Within consulting services spending, funding is mainly being allocated to systems planning and design consulting, at 32.4 percent.
This is followed by training, education and other consulting at 27.9 percent, with disaster recovery and business continuity planning following at 27.1 percent.
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The Kable report also revealed that service support and help desk functions were high on the list to be outsourced; 53 percent of respondents had already outsourced this and 17 percent were considering doing so in the next two years.
51 percent had already outsourced application development and 17 percent were considering doing so.
There was also significant appetite for outsourcing more key IT functions, with 49 percent having outsourced IT infrastructure and 17 percent considering it in the next two years.
However, outsourcing management of IT itself had seen less take-up, with only 39 percent having done so. However, 17 percent were considering doing so.
This suggests that, in general, businesses wish to retain some oversight over the infrastructure but are becoming increasingly comfortable with giving non-core work to third parties.
All figures come from Kable’s ICT Customer Insight survey, which polled 2685 respondents, from across the world in Q4 2014. The survey findings include data on hardware budget allocation, telecommunications budget allocation and software budget allocation. Subscribe to Kable here.
