COVENTRY, UK: IT Sourcing Europe, a UK-based nearshore IT Outsourcing (ITO) research and advisory company has announced the completion of its Norwegian ITO survey, conducted in the frames of the ongoing All-European IT Sourcing and In-House Software Development Research 2010.

The survey was aimed to explore the key trends and hallmarks of the Norwegian software development outsourcing market in 2010 said a press release.

According to the survey findings, in 2010 the number of companies outsourcing their software development (SD) nearshore (i.e. maximum 2 time zones away from Norway) exceeds the number of those who outsource offshore (i.e. more than 2 time zones away) with a ratio of 32 percent vs. 27 percent.

The top three drivers of decisions to outsource a corporate SD function are: difficulty finding appropriate IT resources and specific skills within Norway (31 percent of respondents), pressure to reduce operating costs (23 percent) and necessity to improve business development strategy (15 percent).

Web 2.0 (Microsoft ASP.NET, Java, EpiServer, open source etc) remains the most outsourced area of expertise (by 37 percent of companies), followed by Enterprise 2.0 (J2EE, J2SE, C#, MySQL etc) (21percent of companies) and mobile development (19 percent). Only 8 percent of Norwegian companies outsource embedded development.

Overall, the majority of Norwegian companies, 30 percent admit that outsourcing their software development to a 3d party has been the right decision versus only 1 percent of companies who are very dissatisfied with the decision to outsource.

In the future, 42 percent of current outsourcers plan to locate their SD function nearshore versus 12 percent who plan to go offshore.

The survey was conducted from all of the major verticals, from IT, telecom, web and mobile development to hospitality to finance and banking etc.