ResourcePad Blog

According to Silicon.com, because outsourcing is experiencing a general slump in the US, Europe should be the key destination for those in the offshore outsourcing market. Indeed, to that extent, many vendors I know have begun to shift their focus to Australia, Germany and the like where until a few months ago, their key demo was the American market. Just goes to show how quickly things change in the IT business.

Another thing that’s worrying is the increasing reports of a global slowdown in outsourcing - TPI states that there’s been a 17% reduction in projects which is the largest decrease since 2001 in the first three quarters of the financial year. However, although the average contract value of outsourced projects in the US were down 38% to about $179 million, Europe showed an equal (35%) increase in their average totaling $277 million, which is approximated $100 million more than the US. While Europe only had a global (outsourcing) market share of about 37% last year, they’re now dominating with a 56% stake in the pie.

So if you’re a vendor, turn your eyes towards Europe and prepare to up your ante especially if you’re from South Asia competing with winners like Romania, Bulgaria, etc.

You can read the full article here.

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Almost on all freelance/offshoring web portals, there are hundreds of providers and buyers have to sort through them and their bids. In order to make it easier for buyers to choose a provider, different portals provide different schemes to rank providers. So how should different providers be ranked? Following are some of the parameters:

1. Provider’s earning - the more the earning, the more successful a provider is. But does that mean he/she’d be good for a particular project?
2. Provider’s feedback from other buyers - the better the feedback the better the provider. However, usually feedbacks are played up. For example, a lot of people on elance.com get a 5/5, and Elance defines 5 as “exceeded expectations”. It’s hard to believe that so many people exceed expectations and the quality is still poor - either there is something wrong with the expectations or the rankings are hyped up!
3. Number of feedbacks in a given period of time - this is also not a real representative as a lot of providers deal with same buyers and ask them to give dummy feedbacks.
4. Certifications - some sites like rentacoder.com have certification tests, so different providers can take those tests and be a certified provider, however, a successful project takes more than simple certifications i.e., management, risk planning, communication etc.

These are some of the parameters used by various portals, but what about direct contacts. That usually depends on the charisma of the sales person. So how can we rank providers in an accurate, honest and fair way? I think I should invite some of our readers to comment on that.