This study takes a holistic view of the U.K. IT services and business services market, and includes vendor revenue rankings for 2008, short profiles of key vendors, and market size forecasts for 2008-2013. IDC expects the overall U.K. IT services, business consulting, and "key horizontal" business process outsourcing market to be essentially flat in 2009 (0.1% decline), which represents a stark fall from the growth in 2008 of 5.5%. We expect just 2.8% growth in 2010, followed by accelerating growth from 2011 to 2013.

Cost is now unambiguously the most important factor when organizations are considering approving new spending projects and selecting vendors to implement these projects. Enterprise investment priorities are now more skewed towards more "nuts and bolts" issues such as security, storage management, and DC consolidation — at the expense of more "discretionary" investment such as green and cloud initiatives. The latter will be approved, however, if they deliver cost and efficiency benefits.

"The U.K. will be hard hit by the economic recession, but services vendors will adapt their offering to the new climate of cash preservation and cost and risk control," said Douglas Hayward, research manager at IDC in London and the lead author of the study. "There will be considerable pain and we will see vendor consolidation, but the winners will come out stronger and will have a more strategic relationship with their clients."

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