I’ve been in London a week now, and the only way to describe the potential for IT services of all types is huge.  Here’s the gist of the talk I’ve heard round the board table and the pub table:

1. The first big offshoring movement to India and Eastern Europe has abated somewhat.  Offshoring legacy application replacement, maintenance and support, together with call centre and back-office processing, has largely happened.  There’s always more to go, but a lot of what’s driving offshoring now is IT product companies shifting product development and maintenance to cheaper centres.
2. Enterprises are increasingly looking at IT to enable new market offers, new business channels, and to deal with ever-changing regulatory requirements.  These new IT projects call for high-touch (i.e. close to the business, and not easily offshored) teams of consultants, analysts, architects, user interface specialists, and integrators, with business sector knowledge, local market knowledge, communication skills and facilitation skills. Generic technical expertise and code cutting is still important, but less so than in the past, except when it relates to the blending of new technologies with new business advantages. 
3. The developed world (especially the English-speaking countries,  Nordic countries and Japan) is increasingly worried about the greying and shrinking of its skilled workforce, and is looking to IT to solve the problem.  This is despite the influx of younger workers from Asia and the newly-liberalised eastern Europe, who often don’t have the language, business and technical skills need for point 2. 
4. However, the IT sector - both client side and vendor side - faces the same labour-force challenges, made worse by a major falloff in IT undergraduate intake post-Y2k and post-tech-wreck.  Industry faces a crisis when that undersized cohort is needed to fill its IT leadership and senior technical roles.

Who’s in the best position to win from all this.  Who can get the best leverage from scarce talent?  It’s the IT services industry, in all its forms, but especially professional services, managed services, and software-as-a-service.  Why?  We can attract the best talent,  drawn by the variety of working constantly with many clients, enjoying the pace of the vendor side, and wanting the career progression and personal development that comes with all that.

NB: At Fronde, we’re definitely geared up for point 2 projects and services, focusing on the way enterprises transact with the world, and agile teams working closely with our enterprise clients, supported by specialist managed services, and with good knowledge of both server-based solutions and software-as-a-service solutions.  So I’m smiling.