5 key outsourcing trends for 2024

What are the 5 key trends in 2024 when choosing an outsourcer?

Although many players exist, only a few have taken the "info-partner" turn.

The traditional outsourcer is often perceived as mere insurance, or at best as an external manager. Companies now have too many technical issues on which their business cruelly depends to neglect them.

Companies whose business model is based solely on technology cannot rely on a traditional outsourcer. Tech choices are all highly strategic, and bad decisions pay a high price:

• Customers leave for the competition because of a degraded experience of the platform (latencies, unavailability), a lack of new functionality, or a lack of confidence in data security.
• Departure of teams due to frustration with inoperable environments.
• Liquidation of companies whose technical costs have soared due to lack of control and/or foresight.

Technical choices are now strategic choices. It's time to choose your "info-partner" (outsourcer 2.0) as your best friend. These criteria were selected following 3 years of discussions with customers about their challenges and what they expect from an outsourcer.

A partner who understands your business challenges

An outsourcer is no longer a traditional insurance company that steps in when the platform is unavailable. The outsourcer must now act as a true strategic advisor. Here are just a few of the services we offer:

• DevOps engineers first identify your business challenges and then respond to your technical issues.
• Customized infrastructure improvement recommendations
• FinOps optimization recommendations
• Regular governance reviews
• Business monitoring that simulates user journeys rather than abstract infrastructure metrics

A partner who leaves you free to go into production

By definition, it's easier to insure a car that never leaves the garage than one that's in daily use.

Many traditional outsourcers lock down production to prevent any risk of incidents or disturbances on the platform. So you need to ask your outsourcer every time you go live.

All partnerships are based on trust rather than control. The idea is not to take as many risks as possible on the platform, and therefore on your business, but to offer a secure framework to enable you to go into production as you wish, autonomously and freely.

It's your platform, your business, and it's up to us to adapt to let you accelerate.

A partner who assigns you a point of contact

We're all familiar with the experience of calling your telephone operator, only to be greeted by a stranger who asks you more questions about you and your background and then transfers you to another department, which in turn tells you that you're in the wrong department.

There's no such thing as "everyone will find the solution" outsourcing. Everything has become more complex, and you need answers that integrate your business challenges. It's essential to rely on an "info-partner" who assigns you an identified contact person with a deputy.

Here are a few examples of indicators that will help you define whether this criterion is OK. An info-partner that :

• always proposes the same contact person for strategic issues
• Puts business issues before tech issues
• Tries to solve your problems even outside its scope of intervention

A partner who is transparent about its services and results

Today's businesses have very specific needs and challenges, in an increasingly volatile economic context.

Transparency must be measured in terms of the services we provide and the deliverables we deliver:

• Companies want to know what they are paying for: what deliverables for what services, and above all what financial gains. It must be possible for the customer to put together his or her offer, according to his or her needs and platform.
• The info-partner provides access to all the tools at its disposal to give maximum visibility to its customers. The ticketing tool is excellent for centralizing requests and communication. However, it can sometimes be a bit cumbersome, especially in the event of an incident when you need to be able to communicate quickly.

Here are a few examples of indicators that will help you define whether this criterion is OK. It's an outsourcer that :

• Provides access to monitoring dashboards
• Provides a common slack channel between the outsourcer and the customer (alerts are sent to this channel)
• Provides a web app on the quality of the customer's infrastructure

A continuously improving partner

Every incident or alert is the symptom of a technical or procedural problem. So every alert or incident must be taken as a warning and a real threat to the business.

The info-partner acts as an advisor, carrying out post-mortems to drive continuous improvement. The same incident should never occur twice for the same reason.

Here are a few examples of indicators that will help you determine whether this criterion is met. It's an outsourcer who :

• Drafts and communicates post-mortems (problem, impact, situation, causes, actions and expected results)
• Follows a lean culture, with an obsession for continuous improvement in quality and delivery.

Choosing an outsourcer means making a long-term commitment to a trusted strategic partner. Today, it's essential to surround yourself with one, and you now have all the keys you need to find one.