Managed services and outsourcing forecast.

• Author: Heffes, Ellen M.
• Position: TREASURY

SunGard, a global software and technology services provider, has identified 10 trends in managed services and outsourcing. Among them:

* As outsourcing matures, firms will look to service providers as partners for a complete solution that bundles software with professional services, custom application development and managed services and thought-leadership.

* The Business Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) model will gain momentum as firms can leverage a utility model that serves multiple companies, provides economies of scale and supports an efficient end-to-end business process.

* Firms will continue to seek software solutions delivered on a Software-as-a-Service basis so they can select software components in the cloud to create a single, customized solution.

* Customers of Business Process Outsourcing (B P0) services will look beyond traditional application hosting and staff augmentation or replacement models to add domain-specific business services and thought leadership.

* Information technology executives will outsource more IT infrastructure and application management services to help reduce total cost of ownership and free up internal resources.

* Compliance with regulatory and operational risk requirements are leading firms to look more closely at the integrity of outsourcing service providers and to demand strong Service Level Agreements.

* Firms are moving toward service contracts based on a variable...