Expert: Roland Pinto - 10/18/2010

Question
Hi Roland,

I would like to ask a crucial question on outsource partner
selection.

A colleague of mine has expressed interest in creating a
small company servicing local IT companies and outsourcing
the work to India.

The first thing we wish to do is try to find out is which IT
domains/areas can be outsourced effectively.

Could you advise me on the best domains/areas for
outsourcing? What should we look for? And would you know any
online resources/sites that could provide us with this type
of information?

We wish to then target companies working in these
domains/areas.

Any info kindly appreciated.

Kind Regards,
Noel  

Answer
Noel,

I hope you are well and thank you for using allexperts.com.

Noel, its always exciting to start a business. Fun to talk to an entrepreneur by the way, thanks for the question.

While I cant write a business plan for you, I can surely offer some very nice places to start your research. I have done this before actually outsourcing to the great Asian continent as well as have enjoyed studying scholarly research on the subject.

There are a lot of companies that offer this type of service already Noel. The market is quite saturated. There are companies that offer white label, branded, or non-branded IT services to either VARs (Value Added Resellers) or direct to end user customer (the user of the workstation or the administrator of the server).

I would have to point you to the Managed Services Alliance. This industry association supports a myriad of vendors that offer this type of support and they also offer a host of education, and industry information to allow you to build a strong direct channel IT support company.

As far as which domains are the best to outsource to India... I would not look to only India as a place to outsource, and it also depends on what you are trying to do, whether it is outsourcing telephone inbound support for your VAR customers or if you will also outsource direct systems management (hardware level or just operating system), or if your goals are to sell software development services or high end server management. So many question and so many ways you could fly with this.

I ran a company like this for a decade. It was a fun run.

I hope this helps, if you would like more information or would like a private discussion, just message through the board again and ask me a private question.

I hope this helps!

Roland