Does Cloudsourcing present new business opportunities for IT Services firms?

[Sankar Nagarajan]

Cloudsourcing = Cloudcomputing+Crowdsourcing, The latest buzz word in
my belief ,might well turn out to be a "Blessing in disguise" for IT
Consulting/Outsourcing service providers to leverage new business
opportunities, when it gets orchestrated with the right Value
proposition combined with specific Service offerings and Delivery
models. I believe, there is a potential to create a "secret sauce"
that can dramatically help reduce the TCO of the clients and help them
get a better ROI., much more than what one may get through simply
adopting the cloud paradigm....

'Cloudsourcing' also seems to have some inherent built-in elements
thats lends itself well to IT Outsourcing.

With a recent report from Gartner,naming Cloud computing as one of the
strategic /Top 10 technologies for 2010,the indicators are that the
seeds of 'Cloudsourcing values' that IT services firms may sow today
could well grow and pay rich dividends not in the very distant
future.

This is also an interesting development that such an emerging
opportunity can be leveraged by IT outsourcing companies,Smaller to
Large vendors as it lends well to different target markets and
services. Infact small and agile companies could make a kill!

Do you think there is such a potential in store for IT outsourcing
services firms including new Entrepreneurs?

Do you think ,It will drive IT services players,who currently donot
have a outsourced delivery model, to seek new avenues to adopt
outsourcing (nearshore or offshore) to tap such an opportunity?

Do you think they can help redefine the TCO and ROI benefits to their
clients through Cloudsourcing?

Would be great to know your thoughts...

Thanks in advance.

N Sankar
http://in.linkedin.com/in/nsk007
nagaraj...@gmail.com

[Rao Dronamraju]

Sankar,

Cloud Sourcing or Crowd Sourcing what ever it is called is definitely a
great idea but has some real life practical problems to overcome. We all
live in societies where we do not even trust our own family members or
neighbors, how do you trust someone on the cloud with your IP. What is
mssing is a strong TRUST machanism that makes virtual entities work together
for common good/benefit.

For instance, the recent DARPA red balloon finding contest that was solved
by a group from MIT in 9 hours was done because MIT website/name had
inherent VISIBILITY & TRUST built into it in addition to the financial
incentive that they threw in for ballon finding folks. If you or I setup a
website and gave the people similar incentive, first they need to find your
website, second they need to trust you about the incentive money.

It is a great opportunity for a legel entity (some lawyer bloke?:-)..)to
build such a framework, some kind of a certificate authority or a legally
binding / penalty included process/policy needs to exist. Now if the
contributing entities are geographically dispersed across different
countries then whose laws are you going to follow?...even if you agree on
some rules and mechnsims, imagine enforcing it.

BTW, cloud/crowd sourcing is not new. The DoD and US military has been
working on many projects under network centric warfare, mixed initiative
planning and various other names, for quite a few years. The basic idea is
to pool the intelligence from distributed agents to solve problems both in
real-time and non-realtime. Quite a few US universities were involved in
many projects. They keep initiating these projects with new dimesions and
twists added to them. But what is different now is the scale of doing it on
internet/web to the clouds.

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