Monday, August 6, 2007

BPO, KPO & PPO

You have heard about BPO (business process outsourcing) & KPO (knowledge process outsourcing), but it's time now to add a new word to your vocabulary: PPO.

Coined by Alok Aggarwal, chairman of Evalueserve Inc, PPO means person-to-person outsourcing. The US-based Aggarwal, who is the co-founder of the global research and analytics services firm, says offshoring is now beginning to go mainstream and is touching the upper class and working class alike.

If you thought the PPO market is too small and hence insignificant, Aggarwal has an answer. Individual contracts are often of low value - between $100 and $5,000 - but since the number of end consumers and small businesses is enormous, the total addressable market in the US alone easily exceeds $20 billion.

Evalueserve's research and analysis shows that between April 2006 and March 2007, the revenue from this sector was more than $250 million and it is likely to grow to over $2 billion by 2015 - a cumulative annual growth rate of around 26 per cent. The growth rate, Aggarwal says, is likely to be much more in the future as many of these PPO offshoring trends are at the beginning of their lifecycles.

According to Evalueserve, PPO services follow two business models: the direct interaction model where the individual client signs a contract directly with a vendor in a low-wage country, whose employees (tutors, admin etc) work on a full-time or a part-time basis, or as sub-contractors.

The second is the online marketplace model where the vendors providing PPO services enrol in an online marketplace by paying a monthly subscription fee plus a fixed percentage of the revenue if they win the project through this marketplace. So, when an individual client posts requirements for a new project to be conducted on the online marketplace, the marketplace communicates these opportunities to the selected vendors and freelancers and requests proposals to be delivered to the client.

The client then awards the work to the appropriate vendor depending on price (which may be on a per hour or a fixed cost basis), delivery time and a quality score provided by other clients who have been served by this vendor.

Evalueserve's research estimates that there are currently more than 90 online marketplaces on the World Wide Web and projects that they have involve over 500,000 vendors and freelance professionals who are providing these services from low-wage countries.

Click here to read the entire story

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