We have recently closed our Swedish ITO survey, conducted in the frames of the All-European ITO research 2011. The survey was conducted online in February-March 2011 and completed by the 479 Swedish companies of different sizes and industry sectors. The ratio of outsourcing to non-outsourcing companies that took part in the survey was 41.8% to 55%.

The survey allowed benchmarking the following trends at the Swedish ITO market in 1Q 2011:

·         43.9% of Swedish companies have been outsourcing their IT and/or software development functions for more than 37 months

·         Key drivers of corporate decisions to outsource in Sweden are: reduction of operating costs (up 33.5% from 2010), shortage of domestic IT skills and resources (up 33% from 2010) and necessity to focus on core competences such as product marketing, business development, infrastructure setup/upgrade etc (up 21.3% from 2010)

·         The overall volume of the outsourced projects in Sweden has lessened over the past months with the €0-49K projects increasing by 34.9%, and the €500+K projects dropping by 7.2%, compared to 2010

·         28.9% of the companies surveyed use Offshore/Nearshore Dedicated Center model, which is down 23.5% from last year, while 34% of companies use Dedicated/Own Team model to engage with providers – up 14.7% from 2010. Fixed price projects are outsourced by 31.5% of companies, which is down 16% from last year

·         30% of companies transfer their SD/IT function(s) nearshore – up 3% from 2010; 25% of companies outsource within Sweden - up 5.3% from 2010, and 22.5% of outsourcers go offshore - down 2.5% from 2010

·         Web 2.0 solutions remain most outsourced – by 60% of companies, followed by Enterprise and mobile areas of expertise that are outsourced by the equal numbers of companies – 29% each

·         There is an increasing demand for cloudsourcing from the Swedish companies - up 13.1% from 2010

·         Outsourcing is most adopted by the IT, software development and telecom companies – 40.5%, followed by mobile software development companies – 17.5% and iGambling providers and games studios – 9.5% of the entire representative sample

More thought-provoking findings will be available in the Swedish ITO Intelligence Report 2011 to be published in May 2011. The Report can be pre-ordered at http://www.itsourcing-europe.com/ITO_Knowledge_Center.html#swedish_report