But the will face the additional pressure on their margins as the dollar continues to depreciate.

Outsourcing Innovation: Transformation? What Transformation?

Remember all that talk about how an IT services provider could be your partner in innovation? Forget about it.

"The focus will shift away from open-ended efforts," says , research director of outsourcing consultancy EquaTerra. "Buyers will not have much appetite for transformation in 2009."

"Innovation or big solution implementations will slow down dramatically," agrees Cohen, "unless you prove I'm going to get back in cost improvements a lot more than I put out and it would have to be a pretty rapid ROI for any transformation."