According to a recent report by Gartner on global IT spending, worldwide IT spending is projected to grow 3.7% in 2012 to $3.8 trillion. Earlier estimates had pegged the year’s growth at 4.6%. Revenues from IT services are expected to grow at a comparatively slower pace of 3.1% to $874 billion. Gartner expects the Eurozone crisis to impact technology spend. Despite these worrisome predictions, IT services outsourcers are continuing to surpass market expectations.
Customer service can make or break some businesses. Yet customer service is something that businesses often outsource to companies like C3. C3 handles customer communications for corporations that see customer service as one of the most important aspects of their businesses. C3’s leadership team has about 30 years of customer management experience between them. C3 has locations spread throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia, but the company’s corporate office is in Plantation, Florida.
Sramana Mitra: Hi Rick. Let’s start with an overview of C3, your background and just some general context. Read the full article »
We’ve covered outsourcing sites before, like Elance and Freelancer.com, which are open to all kinds of freelancers, from telemarketers to virtual assistants to graphic designers to bookkeepers. But some, like Chicago-based CrowdSPRING, specialize. CrowdSPRING dedicates itself to serving the needs of creative individuals, like graphic designers and writers, and those who need their services. Founders Ross Kimbarovsky and Mike Samson wanted to create an outsourcing environment, using a crowd sourcing model, that would safely open the world to new possibilities rather than limiting small business owners, or whoever needed creative services, to people in their own countries or communities. Read the full article »
Despite Latin America’s increasing prominence as a provider of IT outsourcing services to North American companies, a popular perception remains that Latin America serves as a second choice to China. However, when the relative advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing IT functions to Latin American providers are compared to those of Chinese providers, the results indicate that Latin America can effectively compete with China as an IT outsourcing hub, and in many instances may even prove the superior choice. Read the full article »
FR: It’s less than 10% of the total community of Elance that’s on the premium model. The membership that we’ve designed – it’s funny because we really designed it to be fair to our community. It’s a month-to-month. We don’t try to lock people into membership for as long as possible. They can actually upgrade and downgrade every month. When they need it, it goes up. If they decide the next month they want to go on vacation, or they don’t need to work, or they don’t need to submit any proposals, if they like to, they can go down to free. Read the full article »
Followers of this blog may recall that Elance was featured on Deal Radar in 2008. Founded in 1999, the Mountain View, California–based company continues to give outsourcing competitors like oDesk and Freelancer.com a run for their money.
Sramana Mitra: Hi, Fabio. Would you give me some background about you and also about Elance. I know you’re not a founder, but give us a bit of the genesis of the Elance story. Read the full article »
New year. Fresh energy. Time to take stock of trends and open problems for 2012. The most notable change this coming year is that Steve Jobs is dead. In death, however, he has become even larger than life, and his legacy will drive this decade’s technology movement for a while at least. One of his key legacies is the marriage of technology and humanities, which I believe will shape the next phase of evolution in the IT industry. I elaborated my vision in Silicon Valley: The Next Decade.
In Top 10 Tech Trends For The Decade, I outlined a set of key movements which are pretty much the driving factors for the time being:
According to researchers, Global Industry Analysts, global market for business process outsourcing (BPO) is projected to be worth $280.7 billion by 2017. Growth will be driven by expansion in finance and accounting outsourcing with the financial services, manufacturing, logistics and travel industries adopting the F&A outsourcing trend. The report estimates that while the U.S. will dominate the global market, demand will increase from emerging countries and regions, including China, Latin America, and Central Europe. Clearly, outsourcers need to ensure their operations are present in these locations to be able to address this market.
