Key to IT or Business Process Outsourcing - The Internet

The Internet is the greatest collaborative medium that has come along in a long while. It cuts down problems due to distance and problems due to the heteregeneous nature of hardware and software that buyers and sellers of outsourcing services use internally within their companies.

For a long time, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) interfaces were thought to be the solution to such colloborative efforts but EDI interfaces offer more security and some semblance of a private network but is very expensive and not practical from the point of widespread adoption.

Along comes TCP/IP and the Internet and all interconnection problems between different companies vanish into thin air like the San Francisco Fog on a summer day!

This is because TCP/IP has become the de-facto standard that everyone in the world has agreed to support, individuals and companies alike!

This presents a golden opportunity for buyers and sellers of outsouring services to use the highly efficient and effective mechanisms that the Internet opens up.

Microsoft Sharepoint Portal software is a good example. It is the FASTEST growing software product by way of user licenses in the world. For good reason. Many companies are using its updated and built-for-the-internet architecture to build their own Collaborative Extranets. These can be used very easily for centralizing all efforts, schedules, documents, interactions, communications, etc in one central place that buyers and sellers of outsourcing services can access and coordinate their efforts.

Microsoft Sharepoint Portal is only one example of how the latest technologies leverage the Internet to provide a global colloborative framework. There are other equally good products, I am sure. The point is that the Internet is leveraged for enabling all this.

There are enough security products, hardware and software for the Internet that can enable buyers or vendors of outsourcing services to centralize their collaborative efforts with strong security and privacy safeguards.

It’s there for us already! Many large Fortune 100 companies have already started using it.

Mail and Telephone become non-scalable when the outsourcing efforts become larger.

The Internet is there to help! If only you leverage it!