Person-to-Person Offshoring new rival to IT Gaints

New Delhi, May 14: IT giants like IBM, Infosys, Wipro and WNS have got a new rival on the fast expanding BPO landscape. The new challenger is not some thousand-employees strong Business Process Outsourcing firm, but individuals who could be sitting anywhere alone before their personal computer, but have before them an addressable market worth over 20 billion dollars in the US alone.

While outsourcing of services by medium and large-size companies from the US and Europe to low-cost countries like India has been going on for a decade now, the new trend in this space to watch out for is Person-to-Person Offshoring (PPO), says global research and analytics firm Evalueserve.

PPO consists of services that can be offshored to individual professionals by entrepreneurs seeking to bootstrap their business and can be utilised by anyone with the technology advances and growth of internet in today's world.

All a professional requires to render these services is a PC and a reliable internet connection. While each PPO contract is often of low value usually between 0 and ,000 (Rs 4,000 to Rs 20,000) but due to the large number of end consumers involved, the total addressable market in the US alone has exceeded billion, Evalueserve Chairman Alok Aggarwal said.

To make the things easier, there are already close to 100 websites such as Guru.com, Elance.com, RentACoder.com and GetAFreelancer.com acting as trading platforms for such services and over ten lakh professionals -- a majority of who are from India -- are already registered on these sites as PPO providers.

Guru follows a "closed auction" bidding and also provides a "SafePay Escrow" account that protects the interests of both the client and the vendor during the execution of the project. California-based Elance.com has approximately 80,000 registered vendors and free-lance professionals, of which about 50 per cent are from low-wage countries. RentACoder.com, a Florida based marketplace, has over 175,000 registered freelancers and is focussed on IT sector.

Another such marketplace, GetAFreelancer.com has mostly IT programmers from low-wage countries as its registered freelancers. Here, the buyers decide between closed or open bidding, while it also provides a payment escrow service.

One of the fastest growing segment in the PPO market is editorial and writing services, which include writing for books, copy writing, editing, proof-reading, news articles, newsletters, press releases, translation and web content.

These tasks do not require expensive infrastructure and people can work from their homes with a broadband connection and earn between 10 and 25 dollars for an hour's work. Among other popular PPO services being offered currently, jobs like online tutoring fetch 8-40 dollar an hour.

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