Randy Marcinko moderated a panel of companies supplying and using different kinds of outsourcing solutions. Peter Hause of Javien outlined how they help to implement content ecommerce solutions for publishers of many sizes, including major B2B publishing companies. With a development staff focused on many other product priorities, outsourcing ecommerce was an important path to getting publications on line effectively and reliably. Rigorous certifications required for PCI-card ID authorization systems also complicate the development path for ecommerce non-experts. As an example Peter outlined a major financial services company provided data on corporate earnings wanted to sell earnings call transcripts online and to co-brand payment screen with their distribution partners. The client was bought buy a company that specializes in corporate licensing of content, which then decided to apply the Javien ecommerce model with others of its divisions. So even in a company with thousands of software developers worldwide outsourcing to specialists can make sense for mission-critical applications. Looking into the technical details of the "fit" for outsourcing is essential, especially when companies get purchased and the buyer plans to migrate content from a then-legacy platform to a new environment. In this instance an outsourced solution with easily migrated interfaces can allow for a transition that will be relatively painless from both the clients' and the company's perspective.

Krish Menon of TheNewsMarket, the leading online provider of broadcast-quality corporate and government video footage, has lead teams seeking and providing outsourcing. While all of the design is done with an in-house team, all of their development is outsourced. After four years in a successful relationship with an outsourcing vendor they are adding a new vendor to provide both scale and diversity. A key learning: size matters, but it's about "right-sizing" development requirements to available teams. Large outsourcing companies may not want to take on relatively small projects and small teams may be overwhelmed. Building an outsourcing team that can expand and contract with variable development needs can be a challenge when it comes time to introduce new projects and processes that may change, putting pressure on product and process quality. This puts a premium on introducing new processes and new teams carefully and working in "chunks" so that teams can be integrated into processes and projects smoothly. Backups are also important to make sure that there is coverage across critical portions of the development cycle. Krish has come to appreciate many of the basic tools of corporate software development such as well-written requirements. "If you can develop a good spec, outsource it, and include IP protection from the beginning," so ownership of intellectual property is clear across the relationship.

Chandu Nair of Scope e-Knowledge Center, which has grown to a 400-person global staff, notes that what has seen a shift in outsourcing in publishing, similar to the shift experienced by sports apparel manufacturer Nike, which has outsourced all of its factories. For one of their multi-billion dollar clients, they started as "babes in the woods" from a marketing perspective, but after six months in starting with outsourcing they realized that it could be a difficult environment. Starting with a simple database enhancement they helped to increase the number of products that could be produced, they moved to being on annual contracts, but it could still be a very volatile environment, moving from a hundred or more people working on a project to a handful. This keeps a premium on communication both with the clients and their staffs to ensure that everyone feels warm and on board and focused on problem solving with manageable expectations. Many companies are not ready for outsourcing in terms of having the correct processes and measurements in place, especially when the client does not have a staff that's familiar with the technical challenges that an outsourcing company takes on. Chandu's key recommendation: "Scale matters but skill rules."

This was an interesting panel, though it's not clear that new solutions came to light. The key take-away I had from it is that outsourcing is a highly embedded process in publishing now: there doesn't appear to be much controversy about the whether, only when and how much is appropriate with the specific kind of checklists needed to ensure success. It dovetails nicely into the discussion from the earlier panel on buy/build decisions, but with more inherent potential challenges if the outsourcing partner is not well-focused on a specific range of solutions.