According to Brian Prentice, research vice president of Gartner, the near sourcing trend is partly driven by the onset of new European Union (EU) initiatives set to be adopted next year. These policies are aimed at driving laws to protect jobs and reduce offshoring by 20 percent through 2016. In contrast with offshoring, nearshoring is the transfer of business or IT processes to companies in a nearby country, typically with one which shares borders. This is usually due to capitalize on benefits of proximity which include time zones, cultural and linguistic similarities, and political factors.
Plunkett Research points to the rise in outsourcing cost in places such as China which since its business and economic reforms were launched in 1978, has been a bigger beneficiary of foreign investment than most other countries. "This is one reason why China’s economic growth has been so impressive. China’s exports grew ten-fold to nearly $1 trillion annually in the years from 1978 through 2006, and reached approximately $1.5 trillion in 2010. Nonetheless, China has hundreds of millions of low-income residents subsisting on low-tech agriculture. At the same time, personal income has made great strides in China. World Bank figures show that more than 600 million people in China were living on less than $1 per day in 1981. By 2005, that number had dropped to about 150 million. As of 2011, Chinese firms in many cities were facing worker shortages, while strikes and worker unrest recently forced some of the largest employers to boost wages by 24% to 80%."
Ziptask Founder Shawn Livermore says the value proposition to American workers is a straight forward one, " why not easily make a few extra thousand dollars a month on side projects to supplement your income. By combining a professional project management platform & marketplace with experienced local experts, we greatly increase the likelihood of a successful project for both parties involved." Livermore says that "unfortunately many outsourcing / freelance marketplaces today are becoming dominated by scammers and fraudsters. We help avoid these pitfalls."
Interestingly Livermore points to what he describes as the "theoretical possibility that we could probably outsource our entire job for a while, and no human would notice. The guy from Verizon did it for over a year, and scoffed at the company's review process when he was labeled the "best engineer in the building". He knew he could hire a few different people from China to do his entire job, and spend his valuable time watching cat videos and updating his real time facebook status." He goes on to say "this is both great and terrible at the same time."
The intention of the Ziptask platform isn't to help workers slack off to surf cat pictures on Facebook, but instead to help bring greater efficiency to what the company believes is the hardest part of outsourcing, project management. Ziptask describes itself as "taking care of the tedious process of pre-screening, interviewing, hiring, explaining, managing, and reviewing work product. This is a huge time savings, and ensures projects follow a structured and standard approach, preventing the typical failure scenarios from occurring in most cases."
So far the company has seen a rapid adoption of its platform by a group of dedicated "beta customers". James Mitchell CEO and Founder, Strategic Blue, a UK cloud broker and fellow TechStars company says "This platform is perfect for our company. We've come back to ziptask several times for projects because they seem to know what we need. It's like they're reading our minds, and their project managers simply never fail."
Livermore also mentioned that the company is in the process of raising it's "A Round" of funding. If you outsource your web development, Ziptask might be a company worth checking out.
(Disclosure: The author of this post is a TechStars Mentor)
