North America's IT services market will continue to face challenges in 2010 and will not see a substantial recovery until at least 2011. Ovum, a part of the Datamonitor Group, has released "North American Market Trends 2009: IT Services Forecast," a model which measures growth through 2013. Ovum shows the NA market will have growth of just over 2% in 2010, but will increase to slightly under 3% in 2011.

Co-author John Madden states he believes vendors who are planning on "pent-up customer demand to fuel substantial growth" in 2010 should rethink their strategies.

"While there are encouraging signs for an economic recovery, CIOs and IT decision-makers are clearly more cautious when it comes to making short and long-term IT investments," Madden said.

By 2013 that project-led and applications services, as well as business process outsourcing (BPO), will slightly outpace growth in infrastructure and support services.

In 2009 it was mostly about cutting cost and increasing efficiencies. Madden explained how "that was reflected in the drop-off in discretionary consulting, application and BPO projects. Infrastructure services such data center outsourcing, while suffering a decline, displayed some resilience as end users looked to third-party providers to take over select IT functions at reduced cost."

Madden explains, "The NA market appears to be recovering at a slightly faster pace than other regions, although the recovery is proceeding at a glacial pace."

Awaiting a stronger recovery to take place, North American end users will remain in a bit of a defensive IT spending position this year and, "…loosen their IT purse strings in a more substantial fashion in 2011 and 2012," Madden added. ENS