Amdocs on Thursday released the results of a global survey into service provider IT services sourcing trends. The survey found that despite service provider ambition to simplify and streamline their IT operational environments, three out of four service providers have increased the number of their IT services vendors over the past five years.

Key findings of the survey reveal that service providers:

• Are using more services vendors than before: 74 percent of respondents said that over the past five years they had increased the number of services vendors they used, with 26 percent having doubled their number of vendor agreements during this period
• Are using more services to re-align their operations in support of technological developments: emerging IT domains (e.g. cloud computing and big data analytics), new organizational buying centers (e.g. centers within the CMO and CTO organizations), and growing skills gaps have been identified by 77, 74 and 72 percent of the respondents respectively as key factors driving the rise in services engagements.
• Agree that core IT domains saw the largest increase in services vendor engagements:IT infrastructure, BSS and OSS (business and operational support systems) were identified by 77, 64 and 54 percent of respondents respectively as the three IT domains seeing the highest increase in the number of external services vendors.
• Are looking for sourcing engagement models that can help them simplify IT operational structures: Minimizing business risk (79 percent) and deal complexity (72 percent) were defined as the top criteria for selecting sourcing engagement models by survey respondents

“What the survey indicates, and what is further supported from our discussions with customers, is that there is a growing need for prime service integrators that service providers can rely on to take full accountability over the entire, multi-vendor structure in order to reduce risk and allow service providers to focus on their business, rather than deal with the increasing complexities of the IT environment”, said Rebecca Prudhomme, vice president of product and solutions marketing at Amdocs.

“Service providers are looking for a trusted advisor who can help them identify the technology and IT services required to best deliver on their business objectives, as well as introduce added value and efficiencies through service innovation”, Prudhomme added. “With our innovative service methodologies and tools and more than 30 years’ experience serving the communications industry, including the world’s largest service providers, we believe Amdocs is best positioned to help our customers achieve their goals and optimize business outcome”.

Amdocs offers a comprehensive range of IT and business services solutions to help service providers drive growth, improve efficiencies and offer a better customer experience. Amdocs’ services cover the full project lifecycle, from business consulting, systems integration and testing, to IT managed services, including daily operations.

Conducted for Amdocs by Coleman Parkes, the research surveyed 50 CIOs and 50 senior vice presidents responsible for IT operations or IT services procurement at large service providers across 23 countries in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas.