The UK stands out in Europe for its willingness to outsource.

The four connected graphs below may help to show how outsourcing, and the willingness to source to Indian providers, are more prevalent in the UK than in the other European 'majors'. (My apologies for the text which is at times sideways or upside-down.) All data relates to 2007. IT market numbers come from IDC Trackers, and GDP comes from the CIA Factbook.



The top-right graph shows GDP against server market for the big four nations of Europe: Germany, the UK, France and Italy. As you might expect, the size of the server market is roughly proportional to GDP—the greater the income of a country, the more it spends on computers.

Move across to the top-left graph and we have a plot of server market against data centre outsourcing market. For the three continental countries, there is a roughly straight-line relationship between spending on servers and spending on data centre outsourcing: the more you spend on servers as a nation, the more you also spend on outsourcing. But the UK is clearly off that straight line—it outsources data centres disproportionately more, given its server spending. Indeed, although Germany is the bigger country in terms of both GDP and server market, the UK has the bigger outsourcing market.

Down to the bottom-left graph, which shows a plot of the applications management market against the data centre outsourcing market. These are both sub-segments of the managed services / outsourcing market, so you would expect the linear relationship that the graph broadly shows—although France does proportionately more application management, given its levels of data centre outsourcing, than Germany.

And now across to the most interesting graph, which shows the proportion of each country's applications management market which goes to the top three India vendors: Infosys, TCS and Wipro. Whereas they account for less than 3% of the market in France, Germany and Italy, in UK they take almost 10% of the market.