In pursuit of mid-sized outsourcers

With large companies vocal about cost-savings, interest towards outsourcing has trickled down to mid-sized businesses and some enterprising companies like ELance Online is cashing on it.

Elance Online markets itself as a one-stop shop for outsourcing, particularly targetting mid-sized businesses who do not have enough time and know-how to develop an extensive lists of outsourcing candidates for tasks such as programming, software development, Web design or database application development.

So far, the company has lured about 14,000 service providers in its website and surprisingly, most of them are also based in the US and others from India and as far as Russia.Elance screens the contractors upfront, verifies credentials and provides work samples when possible

An Elance official also noted a trend referred to as "reverse outsourcing"; that is, international companies are outsourcing their IT functions to small U.S.-based businesses

And according to the company, price alone does not guarantee these companies contracts. References, past performance and turnaround time are among the factors that often outweigh price.

The value proposition lies in the fact that since service providers are small players, clients can save a lot more since they're not dealing with the likes of Infosys or service behemoths like IBM.