Outsourcing IT services will quadruple due to lack of in-house skills

A lack of relevant skills within the channel has sparked an influx of external IT services being drafted into businesses.

Skills such as unified communications along with other leading technologies are the most in demand in the region. They make up around 40 per cent of skill shortages, with unified comms taking up half of this share.

Simon Day, director of Comms-care Professional Services, said: “Our research highlights that the rise of IT professional services isn’t just a coincidence, but a positive move by businesses to offer an enhanced service to their customers as the need to adopt new technologies rapidly grows.”

The research also found that only one in ten channel businesses are encouraged to outsource to save on costs, meaning that the majority are doing so because they have no one in-house qualified for certain tasks.

Day concluded: “The acquisition and integration of Platform Consultancy into the Comms-care service portfolio has enabled Comms-care to expand its high end professional services proposition in technology areas that our partners have immediate requirements for, such as Office 365, Lync, Windows Server 2003 migration, Hyper-V, System Centre, as well as Citrix and VMware virtualisation solutions.

“As a result we are already seeing a significant increase in requests from our partner base to provide more professional services.”