Avasant

Benchmarking IT and outsourcing against the market

Avasant is an advisory and research firm. Its website describes it as a management consultancy working in sourcing advisory, digital and IT transformation, global development and governance. A large part of its offer is benchmarking: it compares a client's IT spending, staffing and outsourcing contracts with market data so the client can see where costs and performance sit against industry peers.

The benchmarking platform and its data

The comparisons run on a cloud-based platform called AvaMark, which the company says supports market analytics across millions of financial and operational data points. Its contract benchmarks draw on access to more than 50,000 contracts, and the company also acquired the research group Computer Economics, whose IT spending and staffing surveys, it says, date back to 1990.

Areas benchmarked

• Spend and total cost of ownership. IT spending is sorted into standard service areas and cost pools following technology business management practice, so a company can compare its costs with peers and build scenarios for sourcing or organisational change. It describes a library of over 75 metrics spanning more than 25 sectors, including operating versus capital spending.
• Staffing and salaries. Staffing ratios are available for 16 IT functions, and salary data covers more than 100 job titles across over 400 locations in the US, the UK and Canada.
• IT infrastructure services. Price comparisons cover end to end managed services across more than 90 resource units in 50 geographies, taken from negotiated contracts with a range of providers. Areas include server and storage, databases and middleware, end user devices, service desk and network and security.
• Digital and application services. Rate cards for over 100 IT roles are broken down by delivery location, project length and billing model, such as managed service or time and materials. The topics include cloud and DevOps, and AI, BI and data services.
• Cloud agreements and software licences. Contracts for enterprise cloud and licenses can also be benchmarked.

How a benchmark is used

The company describes an engagement for a multinational engineering and construction firm in which a cost baseline was built across 14 countries and seven service towers and compared with market figures. It says the findings led to savings for the client, helped the provider keep the account without a competitive bid, and widened the scope of the contract.

Research and sector work

Beyond benchmarking, the site carries annual research reports on IT, procurement and marketing budgets and staffing, healthcare provider performance, and regional markets in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. It also publishes sector case studies for healthcare, banking and financial services, manufacturing, and aerospace and defence.