Coined by Alok Aggarwal, chairman of Evalueserve Inc, PPO means person-to-person outsourcing. The US-based Aggarwal, who is the co-founder of the global research and analytics services firm, says offshoring is now beginning to go mainstream and is touching the upper class and working class alike. “This is very reminiscent of 1991-92 when manufacturing in China and other low-wage countries began to impact the lives of the rich and the not-so-rich in developed countries,” he says.

Here’s how: small offices, home businesses and even individuals are utilizing PPO services everyday through various means such as online tutoring and home & landscape design services. Even invitation cards for weddings and other parties, personal assistant secretarial services like scheduling appointments and maintaining calendars are now being outsourced.

Many of these professionals work from their homes with a broadband connection and given the low overhead, vendors and freelancers can charge fairly low rates.

A few companies, such as Future Net (a subsidiary of the Alaphuza, India-based Future Groups) are also experimenting with providing ancillary and concierge services from low-wage countries. In their model, the end-client registers on their website and agrees on a price. Future Net then provides property deals for customers or for their family members and friends. Other services would include payments made to utility service agencies, educational or other institutions; and purchase of simple items such as movie tickets, personal computers, and electronics equipment.

Apart from online tutoring, for instance, companies such as Transtutors, Career Launcher, Educomp Datamatics, and Tutor Vista also offer one-on-one “live” homework assistance over the web and provide essay-writing guidance and help with educational content. Most Indian tutors charge between $8 and $40 per hour — a pittance by US standards.

Individual contracts are often of low value – between $100 and $5,000 – but since the number of end consumers and small businesses is enormous, the total addressable market in the US alone easily exceeds $20 billion. Evalueserve’s research and analysis shows that between April 2006 and March 2007, the revenue from this sector was more than $250 million and it is likely to grow to over $2 billion by 2015 — a cumulative annual growth rate of around 26 per cent. The growth rate, is likely to be much more in the future as many of these PPO offshoring trends are at the beginning of their lifecycles.

According to Evalueserve, PPO services follow two business models: the direct interaction model where the individual client signs a contract directly with a vendor in a low-wage country, whose employees (tutors, admin etc) work on a full-time or a part-time basis, or as sub-contractors. Since these contracts are of low monetary value, the individual client cannot usually travel to the offshore location or perform a costly due-diligence process, and is therefore exposed to some risk.

The second is the online marketplace model where the vendors providing PPO services enrol in an online marketplace by paying a monthly subscription fee plus a fixed percentage of the revenue if they win the project through this marketplace. So, when an individual client posts requirements for a new project to be conducted on the online marketplace, the marketplace communicates these opportunities to the selected vendors and freelancers and requests proposals to be delivered to the client. The client then awards the work to the appropriate vendor depending on price (which may be on a per hour or a fixed cost basis), delivery time and a quality score provided by other clients who have been served by this vendor.

Some of the prominent online marketplaces are Guru.com (the largest marketplace with more than 625,000 registered vendors and freelance professionals), California-based Elance.com, Florida-based RentACoder.com and GetAFreeelancer.com, owned by Sweden-based Innovateit.

PPO is indeed a silent revolution and one that goes beyond just a few big companies. It’s difficult therefore to doubt Aggarwal when he says PPO signifies how outsourcing is slowly, but steadily, becoming a people’s project by reaching small businesses and homes directly.

From Dell;  June 27, 2007  Dear Dell Customer, As part of our ongoing commitment to customer satisfaction, Dell attempts to communicate conditions or changes to our offerings that might impact our customers.   As you may know, some Dell desktops and notebooks are currently experiencing extended delivery lead times due to liquid-crystal display (LCD) supply constraints.  These shortages are currently being encountered industry-wide, and there are two primary causes for the situation: 

• Industry demand for products such as flat panel monitors, LCD TVs, and notebooks is causing industry shortages on certain LCD panel sizes.

• Industry delays in new factory investments and declines in fabrication utilization rates reduced inventories further.

 The combination of these two factors has resulted in an industry-wide shortage.  The shortage is currently impacting 17- and 19-inch standard LCD sizes most significantly, though it is possible that other panel sizes or resolutions may be impacted in the future.  Dell is diligently working with suppliers to improve supply and delivery lead times as quickly as possible.  It is our hope that these efforts will result in improved supply and shortened delivery lead times within the next 60 days.  Until this time, please contact your account team to investigate shorter-lead time product alternatives. Customer satisfaction has always been and continues to be Dell’s foremost concern, and we apologize for any inconvenience caused by this supply issue. 

Leigh Vosler is paid placement marketing manager with Sierratradingpost.com, a Wyoming-based retailer of outdoor gear and apparel. Link Walls is senior product manager with ChannelAdvisor, a provider of channel management solutions that manages paid search campaigns, in North Carolina. Tim Kauffold is director of business development for OneUpWeb, a Michigan-based consulting firm that also manages paid-search campaigns for others. Sierratradingpost.com, ChannelAdvisor and OneUpWeb have all purchased search advertising from Yahoo!’s old system and its new Panama platform.

All three executives give Yahoo! positive reviews for Panama, which, they say, includes the following improvements and enhancements.

• Instant Ad Approval — In most cases, ads are approved by Panama almost instantly. With Yahoo!’s old system, the approval process often took days.

• Better User Interface — Panama’s user interface is much more robust than what Yahoo! offered previously. OneUpWeb’s Kauffold said, “Yahoo! is trying to get more in line with what Google does. This makes it much easier to use Panama, and, frankly, much easier to manage campaigns in both Google and Yahoo! because the interfaces are so similar.”

• Quality-based Bidding — Panama ranks the order of ads based on its Quality Index (similar to Google and MSN ranking systems), which monitors an ad’s click-through rate and its relevance to corresponding keywords. This is different from the previous system, which based an ad’s standing solely on the keyword bid. For advertisers, the change means the top-ranked ad in Panama is not necessarily the one with the highest keyword bid, but rather the one with the highest Quality Index.

Advertisers who closely monitor the Quality Index of their various Panama ads can now achieve a lower cost per click and a higher ranking versus other advertisers who bid on identical keywords. ChannelAdvisor’s Link Walls says this can help smaller firms.

“For advertisers on Panama,” says Walls, “The focus is more on quality. This can help smaller firms achieve a lower cost per click and, simultaneously, a higher ranking, if these firms write very good ad copy and closely align that ad copy with the corresponding keywords.”

Leigh Vosler, with Sierratradingpost.com, agrees: “Panama’s quality-based bidding is working for us. We closely manage it, and we are seeing much better traffic, more relevant traffic, than before.”

• Improved Groupings of Ads and Keywords — Panama allows many keywords to point to one ad and, conversely, a single keyword can point to multiple ads.

“The old system was very management-intensive,” says OneUpWeb’s Kauffold. “Each keyword had to have its own ad. You couldn’t test multiple ads for a single keyword or group of keywords. That’s now changed. It’s similar to what Google does.”

• Geographical Targeting — Panama allows advertisers to target ads to a specific area. It does this, according to Yahoo! personnel, through use of a consumer’s IP address and other data collected by Yahoo!. This benefits advertisers who sell products or services in, say, Dallas, because they can now specify that their ads appear only for searches from users in Dallas.

The executives report other improvements with Panama, such as better and quicker reporting, better testing mechanisms and better management tools overall. Said Walls, “Panama has a keyword insertion tool that is very handy, for example. Advertisers can now easily insert the search term directly into the ad copy.

Vosler likes the increased competition between search firms.

“We’re excited that Yahoo! wants to compete with Google and MSN,” said Vosler. “It’s good for all search advertisers.”

Walls recommends that ecommerce firms “definitely try Panama.” Kauffold agrees: “It’s certainly the time to get back to Yahoo!. They’ve shown a serious commitment and in our experience they’ve offered very good support.”

 The Key question to be answered is, whether Yahoo can make inroads in capturing more search traffic from Google.

From Yahoo’s perspective, Panama seems to be having some benefits. In 2007 to date, we have seen Yahoo’s CTR increase (even as keyword volume has increased), suggesting that Panama may be having a positive impact on CTR. But, if ROI is not sufficient for our clients on Yahoo, our clients (working in collaboration with our full-service paid search team or using our self-service tool) will cut spend on the lower ROI keywords and exercise a bit more caution experimenting with new keywords. This is one reason, but certainly not the only one (search volume!) that spend on Yahoo trails spend on Google.

The blog search engines here include Technorati, IceRocket, Feedster, Sphere, and more. It’s a super way to find what you’re looking for blog-wise with a minimum of time and effort.

I’m not a big user of metasearch engines; my complaint about them is that they tend not to have search engines I use. Further, I don’t find all the results aggregated and smashed together to be useful.

However, after playing with Zuula.com ( http://zuula.com ) a little bit, I might make an exception; I like the search engines it’s offering and it divides out results into tabs. Despite the fact that it’s in beta, it’s very fast and I didn’t have any problems while using it.

Zuula does metasearch in several different categories, including News, Images, Blogs, and Jobs (!!). The Web metasearch includes Google, Exalead, MSN, and Gigablast. Results from each search engines are broken out by tab. There’s a panel for recent searches on the left side of the results page that you can collapse; otherwise the results look like regular search engine results. The blog search is especially nice as it includes Technorati and IceRocket; add Blogdigger in there and I’ll have just one place to go for my blogging search results. (Google Blog search is supposed to be there as well but currently it’s giving an error.)

The tabs for each search type can be rearranged or customized (tabs removed, filters set, number of search results per screen specified.) There are also global preferences available and a limited advanced search.

I like the resources available here — Zuula has apparently skipped the idea of cramming every possible search resource into the engine and has instead focused on the good ones. I also like how easy it is to customize the interface. I’d like to see a couple more engines for blogs, and maybe a general resources searches that uses Wikipedia and other reference sites. All and all, though, nicely done.

“Today, manufacturers face relentless pressure to quickly build and ship increased volumes of products to new global markets simultaneously,” lamented Alan Fraser, Astoria’s president and CEO.

“Dynamic Product Documentation On-Demand confronts the pressures of Information Age manufacturing by streamlining the documentation process.”

And goodness knows streamlining is hot. Having thus dropped the most desirable buzzword on the streets, Astoria’s SaaS approach to dynamic product documentation looks to realize process automation benefits across the entire documentation lifecycle: content creation and reuse, review and approval, multilingual translation and publication.

The company’s approach builds on a component content management design — otherwise known as single-sourcing — and format neutrality, which at heart is the separation of content from its output structure. This separation affords a greater degree of content re-purposing flexibility.

The Astoria brief also educates readers on the OASIS-driven DITA standard and, here’s the magic key, SaaS, or Software as a Service.

Principal Analyst Dana Gardner of Interarbor Solutions assesses that manufacturers in competitive environments “must rely on value-adds such as high-quality product documentation to differentiate themselves in their markets.” The unique SaaS model for document creation and maintenance “offers a significant competitive advantage.”

This is because SaaS gives service providers on-demand authoring benefits and an automated multi-channel publishing and translation platform, lowering conversion times and improving the customer’s experience across the board. Manufacturers aboard the good ship SaaS note:

• Lower costs for producing, translating and disseminating product documentation worldwide.
• Reduction in product and service delivery time to new markets.
• A better customer experience, resulting in stronger loyalty and retention.

A recent Astoria research effort found that the market for Dynamic Product Documentation On-Demand solutions currently hovers around US$ 4.4 billion per year. The study, conducted by Bold Stroke Consulting of San Diego, California, was confined to revenue from discrete manufacturing companies employing 250 or more. The numbers stems from projected annually recurring revenue from subscription-based SaaS solutions.

San Mateo-based Astoria promotes dynamic product documentation efficiency and as-needed delivery of structured content management. Read more about their bonny deeds at www.astoriasoftware.com. And stay tuned here as Astoria’s SaaS plans unfold.

The New York Post thinks so. The Post is reporting that Microsoft is asking Yahoo to formally enter merger negotiations. Talks have been going on informally for years.

After being spurned by DoubleClick, Microsoft needs to beef up its online advertising and Yahoo would take care of two weaknesses: ads and search market share. If it made sense for Microsoft to buy DoubleClick, it really makes sense to buy Yahoo. The rub: A massive acquisition is out of character for Microsoft.

According to the Post:

While Microsoft and Yahoo have held informal deal talks over the years, sources say the latest approach signals an urgency on Microsoft’s part that has up until now been lacking.

The new approach follows an offer Microsoft made to acquire Yahoo! a few months ago, sources said. But Yahoo! spurned the advances of the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant. Wall Street sources put a roughly $50 billion price tag on Yahoo. Goldman Sachs is apparently working with Microsoft, a fact that’s no surprise since Goldie has been the investment banker of choice for Redmond since its IPO.

Now let’s connect the dots on how this story developed. As Mary Jo Foley reported yesterday Microsoft is trying to transform into an advertising company. Meanwhile, Foley also noted that Yahoo Terry Semel is speaking at a Microsoft-run advertiser confab. Those dots are pretty easy to connect–both dots are the size of the moon. With those two items, all you have to do is regurgitate some old rumors, find a banker to speculate, toss in some background and poof you have a story.

Indeed, the arguments for a deal are pretty good. Yahoo’s Panama ad system is the real deal and if company officials are to be believed–it’s only going to get better. That fact indicates that Yahoo’s price tag will only increase. Why not pay $50 billion today so you don’t have to pay $70 billion later?

Meanwhile, Microsoft needs a way to close the search market share gap. Organic growth isn’t going to cut it. By adding Yahoo and leaving it run mostly independent Microsoft has a shot of matching Google’s share in the future. Today, it has no chance at all.

No one at Yahoo and Microsoft are commenting. Something tells me a lot of other folks will have something to say though. But let’s not get carried away here–we’ve heard these things before.

“The challenge that we have is establishing communications through services rather than a central messaging solution,” he said. “We’re using Tibco partly to provide a messaging backbone for migration and integration but also to provide us with a loosely coupled SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture).”

The messaging backbone, or ESB, will work as an intermediate layer of middleware that lets the company map data from disparate systems, route messages, ensure that services are delivered in the correct order and enforce security rules, Berggren said.

Every event related to an aircraft is considered a message, Berggren noted. Every time a plane takes off or lands, that event in the form of a message is sent to multiple systems, including internal systems that monitor maintenance, and to partner and supplier systems, he added.

In addition, Berggren said that the data is used by another internal system to calculate the costs of specific flights. Those messages will flow through the ESB and automatically update all of the systems using services in real time as opposed to the batch updating used by the airline up until now.

The move to an SOA and the ESB for the migration project will help the airline — which operates 1,000 flights per day with 300 airplanes — react more quickly to multiple unexpected events like weather delays and equipment needing to be repaired, he added.

“It is not really about trying to get rid of the causes of irregularities,” he said. “It is about being able to react to them and execute a different planned schedule, being able to choose from a series of different scenarios. You quickly have to reorganize your fleet plan and execute it. You have to replan the flights, the crew and the gates. That will have effects going on for a week or two.”

Because of all the downstream implications of making such adjustments, real-time data is needed to present officials with different scenarios so they can react to changing conditions, he added. The current batch-oriented way of updating systems doesn’t provide planners with enough data to analyze the impact of different changes they could make, he said.

SAS will begin testing the software this month, and it plans to have the first portion of the project in production by September, with the project planned for completion in March.

Berggren said he projected that the airline will save three to six months on the migration project by using the Tibco software rather than building the messaging backbone on its own. The migration project, he projected, will lower IT maintenance costs by $250,000 per month after it goes live. Additional business benefits “are much higher than that,” but he declined to provide specifics on those cost savings.

The main challenges to the project center around shepherding the users through the transition from using the existing systems to the three new ones, he said. “They are moving from homegrown mainframe applications that they have been using for the past 10 to 15 years,” he said. “They have to change the way they work, and adapt to a new system.”

To combat these cultural challenges, the company has established Tibco user groups and individual champions for the project in different parts of the company, Berggren said.