Global job-matching services such as one offered by Menlo Park, California-based oDesk Corp. are showing that companies of any size can hire offshore IT talent to work on projects.
Aaron Smith operates a small company in Corinth, Texas. He has been using oDesk's online service to find development help and said he works most closely with a programmer in Russia who is paid $15 per hour. A U.S.-based programmer doing similar work would expect hourly rates of $60 to $120, Smith said. Without access to the global talent pool, "we would still be in business, but our software would be far more limited than what it is," he added. "Outsourcing gives us a chance to compete." (Patrick Thibodeau, Computerworld)
oDesk also has some attributes that help it stand out from the pack. It's not just a middleman where service providers and clients find each other. Additionally, the company provides a technology infrastructure that enables sellers and buyers of services to establish long-term relationships with one another. oDesk keeps tracks of hours worked and handles billing and paying. And, so buyers are assured that they're getting what they're paying for. (Steve Hamm, BussinessWeek)
Rafe Needleman, Webware: The online service marketplace oDesk has just added the capability for buyers to spec fixed-price jobs. Previously, all oDesk contracts were hourly.$10 Million Spent To Date On oDesk OutSourcing Projects
"The problem with the fixed price market is that it's not sticky," oDesk CEO Gary Swart told me. Many business relationships that start with one-price jobs evolve into working relationships where the pay is based on the time put in. Swart maintains that competing marketplaces don't foster (or let you manage) that changing relationship; and likewise, until now, oDesk wasn't able to kick off relationships that were best started as single gigs.
Silicon Valley based oDesk, which is a marketplace for developers and companies looking for outsourced developer help, seems to be sailing along nicely. Next week they'll announce that $10 million has been spent on outsourced projects to date, and they have 750,000 or so total billed hours. That's up 50% from last November, when we reported that they had reached 500,000 billed hours. oDesk keeps a flat 10% of fees.
Until recently oDesk only allowed projects to be priced on an hourly basis. Two weeks ago they launched fixed price jobs as well, which is something many comments here requested in our previous posts about them. After a month of quiet beta testing, 750 jobs were posted at a fixed price, with an average price of around $500. (Michael Arrington, TechCrunch)
