French businesses are offshoring more of their IT functions, but this is not a threat to French systems integrators, and the number of IT workers in France will continue to grow, according to the French association of the software and computing services companies, Syntec Informatique.
“In the French market, we’re at a turning point between a few more-or-less successful experiments and a ripening of offshoring, which is becoming more widely applicable,” said Jean Mounet, the association’s president.
Offshoring, or the outsourcing of IT services to a supplier in another country, is a US$12 billion a year industry worldwide, according to Marc Laporte, general manager of market researcher IDC France. However, it still only represents 2.8 per cent of the world IT services market, he said. “The proportion of industrial goods that are exported is much higher.”
In France, offshoring makes up between 2 per cent and 2.5 per cent of revenue in the IT services industry, according to Jean-Fran