The top IT outsourcing companies in the Netherlands

16 July 2019 Consultancy.eu

A new study has identified the top performing IT outsourcing providers in the Netherlands. Overall, the country’s 25 largest players have been handed a score of 7 out of 10 by their clients, with Amazon, Centric, TCS and Accenture leading the way in customer satisfaction. 

The analysis, conducted by Quint and research firm Whitelane, asked 200 of the largest users of IT-outsourcing services (multinationals, mid-sized businesses) to evaluate their contracts with service providers. In total, over 550 IT-outsourcing deals with a contract value of over €1 million were assessed, with clients providing input on which service providers they make use of, and how they rate them in terms of quality, services, innovation and collaboration.

The researchers found that on average, the satisfaction of Dutch organisations has risen slightly over the past twelve months, with average scores rising from 68% in 2018 to 70% this year. There are however apparent differences between the performances of the country’s largest IT-outsourcing providers. The gap between the company with the highest satisfaction score, Amazon, and the number 25 in the list, British Telecom (BT), is 24 percentage points.

Amazon tops the list thanks to its market leading public cloud portfolio of services, combined with a simple but effective pricing model (pricing is based on volume) and its ability to deliver a highly consistent and, more importantly, reliable service. According to Amazon itself, while the cloud giant has seen outage in its Amazon Web Services network, it has never seen an entire data centre fail, because of the extensive handover functionality embedded throughout its massive global infrastructure footprint.

The top IT outsourcing companies in the Netherlands

Dutch players Centric ranks second, jumping from its number 5 position least year. India’s Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) shares third spot with the American consulting and technology giant Accenture, which both managed to improve on their standings. Salesforce, a provider of cloud-based services for customer relationship management processes, rounds off the top five. 

The top ten of the Netherlands’ most valued IT outsourcing providers is completed by a mix of companies. Number six Deloitte has its heritage in the accounting and consulting space, but has over the past years grown a significant technology practice. Its outsourcing team focuses on providing strategic outsourcing advisory and with the implementation of outsourcing agreements (Deloitte does not have a managed services arm). The other players are all traditional IT companies, with two large providers with Indian roots in seventh and eighth, followed by Microsoft, Vodafone and French-origin Orange Business Services. 

The next batch of top performers in the Dutch information technology landscape are well-known names in the IT consulting and services industry – Cegeka, a Belgian family-owned business; HCL, an Indian multinational headquartered in the Netherlands; Ordina, a Benelux-based firm; Capgemini, a publicly listed company with over 200,000 employees globally and the parent of Capgemini Invent; CGI, a Canadian-origin IT company; and Atos, a French-origin player with 122,000 employees.

IT outsourcing trends

Having analysed all contracts for several consecutive years, Quint and Whitelane have identified two trends which are impacting IT outsourcing – an industry valued to be worth more than $140 billion globally. The outsourcing of infrastructure holds the largest share of the space, at $84 billion, with the remainder relating to the total contract value of IT-process and function outsourcing. 

The first is that demand for IT outsourcing in the Netherlands is forecast to continue its growth path. “This trend can be seen in the number of contracts that are being closed,” said Alex van den Bergh, an outsourcing expert at Quint. According to a previous study by the consulting firm, across the board, the ability to focus on core areas of business and improving the quality of IT processes ranks alongside lower costs as the main drivers for clients to outsource their technology operations.

The second main development follows in the footsteps of a trend seen across the wider outsourcing and project management industry. While the number of contracts is rising, the average value of these deal is dropping. Van den Bergh: “Handing over everything to one party – for example application management and infrastructure – is losing popularity.” In addition, the rise of massive cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google) means that client organisations are directly turning to them instead of an IT service provider.