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Standard platforms will become much more common as outsourcers seek to cut their costs.
Business process outsourcing seems to have caught on quite well, given the widespread interest in cloud computing, co-location and software-as-a-service. So what's next? Think about platform BPO.
With BPO, the company hiring the outsourcing firm is in control of what gets outsourced. With platform BPO, the outsourcing service provider that runs the applications or servers or storage gets to dictate the platform, which includes an array of hardware and operating systems and a very standardized version of the application."With platform BPO they control the process, the people, the application and the infrastructure," says Frances Karamouzis, research VP at Gartner. "Companies looking to outsource are saying, 'Give it to me for the software-as-a-service price.' It may be 50 cents per client or 5 cents per invoice, but it allows them to budget better."
That also allows the outsourcing service provider to take advantage of open-source software where it makes sense and to use the hardware that makes the most sense for them economically.
"It also cuts out the software and hardware companies from having a direct relationship with the customer," Karamouzis says. "With SaaS, 85% of the customers don't have service-level agreements and never had a core competency with the software."
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