This IDC study outlines IDC's predictions and assumptions relating to market forces affecting the Western European business solution services markets, and the impact they will have on market forecasts. It sizes the opportunity for providing business solution services in Western Europe in 2006 and for the next four years, and presents the key recommendations from IDC for maintaining and growing business solution services revenues in the coming years.

"The business solution services market continued to see improvement in 2005 over 2004 and this trend is expected to continue in 2006 and the rest of the forecast period," said Marianne Kolding, director for European Services research at IDC. "In the large enterprise space, the focus is gradually moving away from implementing transactional systems to implementing business analytics and service-oriented architectures that will enable the development of rich composite applications with much business value in the near future."

The SCM solution market is the largest segment of the business solution services market in Western Europe but still shows good growth. "This healthy growth is driven largely by a good uptake in engagements around solution areas, such as procurement and sourcing, supply chain visibility, and real-time tracing and tracing," said Erik Bruin, research manager, European Services. "Other, smaller SCM areas with good growth prospects are product life cycle management (PLM), asset management, and spare parts management."