On the other hand, bringing outsourced IT work back in-house remains relatively rare, some analysts said.

In late 2004, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. canceled a seven-year, $5 billion outsourcing contract that it had signed two years earlier with IBM. And last year, Sears, Roebuck and Co. ended a 10-year, $1.6 billion agreement with Computer Sciences Corp. after just 11 months. But both J.P. Morgan and Sears had been involved in large mergers that expanded their internal IT capabilities.

'In general, we don't see that many firms pulling back in work that they've outsourced,' said Stan Lepeak, managing director of Equation Inc., an outsourcing research and benchmarking operation that's owned by New York-based consulting firm EquaTerra Inc.

Lepeak and other analysts said that companies such as Nissan initially went with a single outsourcing vendor for practical reasons.

'There weren't as many providers back then, and the opportunity to multisource was just less viable,' Lepeak said. 'And organizations were less experienced with outsourcing.'