Small and medium sized enterprises (SME) otherwise known as small and medium businesses (SMB) comprise a major part in economies worldwide.  In the US, 99.7% of US companies are SMEs, with the Small Business Association estimating that more than 30% of which would not make it past two years in business.  Given the sheer number of SMEs in the market and the recent global downturn, competition is even fiercer with companies struggling to keep out of the red.

The internet is a veritable treasure trove of information and blogs make up a huge chunk of it.  According to the Universal McCann, about 64.5% of internet users read blogs.  A staggering figure to be sure considering that as of September this year, there were about 1.9 billion internet users in the world.  In outsourcing, blogs are essential if not even more so, mainly because sentiment towards outsourcing tends to go either way.  With this in mind, we decided to search the internet for outsourcing blogs and compile a list of the blogs that we think deserve to be called one of the top blogs on outsourcing in the internet today.

Infinit-O’s Source department has been providing source management services for almost 5 years and today, they manage over 12,000 sources for our Outsourcing Information Insight platform. We have developed a comprehensive 8 stage process for adding and maintaining specific sources of interest for our clients’ requirements. To do this we classify sources using criteria that are fully customizable to our clients’ needs.

Some criteria taken into consideration when we generated the Top 20 list include but not limited to:

A. Reputation

It seems like everyone’s talking about Information Technology (IT) and the cloud.  Even in outsourcing, these topics pop up frequently in the news.  This is in comparison to other services in the outsourcing industry such as knowledge process outsourcing. But while knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) has somewhat faded from the limelight, there are still numerous opportunities in the space such as those in data analytics, investment research and market research outsourcing services.

The business process outsourcing race among destination countries is a fierce competition that has been predominantly lead by South Asian country, India.  The Philippines however, has been holding its own against India, emerging as a power player in the BPO outsourcing space.

The downpour isn’t a torrent anymore …The world is still recovering from the effects of the global economic crisis. And while it may be years until everybody’s able to go back to pre-crisis form, most industries, including the outsourcing industry, now have a sunny outlook for the future.

A day before the release of the 4^th quarter financial results of outsourcing company Convergys Corporation (NYSE:CVG), they announced plans to lay off many of its employees, without disclosing how many and which locations would be affected.

Reading the Indian mainstream news yesterday about India Inc.’s strategy to expand operations in Eastern Europe and hire multilinguals to serve the European finance and accounting sector does not surprise me anymore. In my April article, I talked about how Europe is becoming more comfortable with outsourcing not just to its neighboring countries but also to Asia particularly to the Philippines. The following month, I wrote an article on Philippine Outsourcing re-focusing its efforts to the European market instead in anticipation of US political and trade condition changes.