Leader: The challenge facing outsourcing alliances

Outsourcing may have been a trend for some time but outsourcing alliances are so 2004.

CSC and AON are teaming up, as are EDS and Siebel, for certain circumstances. They are following in the wake of a significant service announcement made earlier this year by BT and HP.

Don't act too surprised about that last one. Forget, for a minute, that the CEOs of both those companies are old muckers from their days at Lucent. Rather, look at the companies' aspirations. Both see services as an opportunity to counter declines in certain parts of their businesses. It's very important to them.

Alliances are a chance to counter the full service providers - the likes of Accenture and IBM, according to a report from Datamonitor out today. While outsourcing and other services have been healthy for companies such as CSC and others, the mood in the industry has been one of envy at times over the success of those two giants.

But don't expect everything to go smoothly. Some companies just won't end up working well together. Others will find a big difference between joint ventures and jointly delivering services.

Buyers of services are getting much more sophisticated, thankfully. Many prominent CIOs are now well-versed in multi-sourcing, not leaving everything to a prime contractor.

Good luck to the alliances. They just have to remember this is a different 'go-to-market' strategy - not an easier one.