Trends of Information Systems Outsourcing - A Romanian Perspective

Abstract

Business today depends on information technology as never before. One of the key stage of information system development consist in election of system design alternative. In this regard could be look at three basic approaches: buy a commercial solution and customize it, develop a custom software application in-house or outsource the project to an external vendor or developer. Ten years ago outsourcing vendors have focused mainly on data centers and legacy applications. In the last decade, outsourcing has become an efficient method to cut costs and improve the performance of a information system development and operating within a company. As the new trend of globalization constrain companies worldwide to go outside of national frontiers to look for the specialised firms for different business areas in their needs for best equilibrium between high quality of services and cost-effective solutions. This is the same situation of IT companies. In this context, could be seen the trend of IT outsourcing market development, in particular oriented to the developing countries, such as those from Asia, East Europe. The pressure to cut costs forces IT companies to search for cost effective solutions for software development projects, so the price for software product could be dropped, and the company could get a better position on the market. One of attractive destination for IT companies is Romania, due to the great number of well-educated and highly skilled IT workers who have better understanding of Western European and American culture. In this paper, we discuss the main evolution stages of information systems design alternatives and the perspective of IT outsourcing market in Romania. We focus on the advantages of Romania as IT outsourcing market under globalization context.