The global outsourcing market will reach $288bn in value this year, according to analyst group Gartner.
The figure represents a modest increase of 2.8 per cent - 5.1 per cent in "constant currency" - compared to 2012. "Nearly all ITO segments are now forecast to grow more slowly during 2013," said Gartner in a statement.
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Intriguingly, Gartner suggested that software- and infrastructure-as-a-service is beginning to have an impact on the traditional services and outsourcing sector.
"Enterprise buyers pursuing hybrid IT strategies and small- and mid-size business buyers adopting infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) are key drivers in cloud and data centre service segment growth rates.
"The global market size for data centre outsourcing is in gradual decline due to workloads moving to IaaS and to 'infrastructure utility services' exceeding the net-new adoption of data centre outsourcing," said Bryan Britz, research vice president at Gartner.
Bring your own device (BYOD) is also having an impact on buyer plans, claimed Gartner, as well as declining enterprise support requirements for end-user devices.
In contrast, demand for outsourced support for mobile end user devices will grow strongly between now and 2017 due to increased enterprise adoption of mobile devices. Desktop outsourcing, however, is in a gradual decline that has been masked globally by growth and, therefore, adoption in emerging markets across Latin America, Asia/Pacific and Greater China.
Indeed, those emerging markets is where the strong growth in demand for IT outsourcing is really happening, according to Gartner's analysis, with those three regions growing more than 13 per cent in 2013 and 2014.
"Expansion by multinationals into these regions, new buyers of ITO that are themselves growing organisations, and fertile economic conditions all drive the positive outlook," claimed Gartner.
In North America, Gartner is forecasting that buyers are looking to shift more IT work to annuity-managed service relationships in a bid to cut IT costs and make them more predictable and in-line with business demand.
"Historically, 'run the business' costs have been less impacted by economic challenges than has discretionary spending on new projects," said Britz.
"Nevertheless, increased client adoption of pricing models that create volume variability is causing the ITO market to exhibit more cyclical patterns. This shift will continue as clients seek to reduce the nearly two-thirds of IT budgets devoted to operations, while shifting the expense from capital expenditure to operating expenditure through the consumption of ITO service lines."