Dean Davison

Leading offshore vendors now compete with global outsourcing vendors, matching resources, industry breadth, and project capabilities. Although most historical success is for application services, vendors are diversifying capabilities to include consulting, vertical expertise, business process outsourcing (BPO), and infrastructure management. As domestic vendors also expand global resources, the competitive landscape for offshore becomes key to successful market dominance.

Overwhelmed by creating service-level agreements (SLAs) for numerous, disparate applications, IT organizations are creating SLAs for application portfolios to standardize operations and simplify SLA measurement and reporting. Regardless of the portfolio structure, an application portfolio matrix reduces the SLAs that must be created, monitored and reported, says new research from the META Group.