The Forrester Wave™: North American Applications Outsourcing, Q3 2010

In Forrester's 38-criteria evaluation of 12 leading providers of applications outsourcing (AO) solutions vendors, Forrester found that in this mature market IBM and Accenture lead the pack due to their superior organizational breadth and depth of capability. The analysis also showed that Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Cognizant, HCL, HP Enterprise Services, Capgemini, and CSC are all Leaders; CGI and Dell Services are Strong Performers. Despite the leadership of two multinational corporations (MNCs), the major offshore providers continue to demonstrate effective maturity and service delivery excellence. Client satisfaction as indicated by client reference scores was exceedingly high across the vendors. We also saw a continued trend of converging value propositions between the leading MNCs and offshore providers, which includes both price competitiveness and cultural fit. While most clients were content with their outsourcing relationships, many continue to voice the desire for a direct, proactive, and innovative business partnership not just a technically competent order taker — neither MNCs nor offshore providers were spared in this regard.