Global growth slowdown in software & systems testing services

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 11 March 2009 15:10

IT Industry - Deals

“Western testers that don’t offer significant offshore delivery will find it increasingly difficult to compete with India, even though the Indian provision of outsourced testing is being dogged by skills shortages. So we could see increasing numbers of testing services jobs going to other low cost territories such as China, Malaysia and North Africa.”

However, Simkin says India remains the fastest growing centre for outsourced testing and quality assurance services, driven not just by Indian vendors but by onshore ones as well.

According to Simkin, all of the tier one IT services vendors with test services including IBM, Capgemini and HP-EDs have offshore testing capacity in India as do a growing number of onshore independent testers such as SQS.
 
“Whilst the scandal that hit Satyam in January 2009 threatens to dent market confidence in Indian System Integrators (SIs) and their test services in the near term, once the dust has settled from the Satyam debacle, it will be restored.
 
“It is possible that some existing Satyam contracts for testing services will be cancelled and awarded to competitors but to date, there is no evidence of this having happened.”
  
The Ovum report predicts that the worsening global economy will impact the worldwide market for testing services, which will not be entirely shielded from reductions in end-users’ budgets.
 
“Still, testing will grow faster this year and next than most other IT services due to the cost efficiencies testing offers and the trend of testing ‘smarter’ that began before the credit crunch hit,” Simkin concludes.