Three champions were crowned Friday -- programmers who beat more than 4,200 others who competed in preliminary rounds online for several months. The event has become known for attracting some of the top programmers worldwide. The National Security Agency is a sponsor and publicly acknowledges that it hopes to recruit some of the top finishers into its ranks.

While TopCoder's roots are in rating and ranking developers through programming competitions, the company also provides outsourced software development to companies by tapping some of the 80,000 programmers the company has amassed through those competitions. Stage Stores Inc., ESPN Inc., Philip Morris USA and Pfizer Inc. are among the growing list of companies that have outsourced projects to the Glastonbury, Conn.-based company.

TopCoder, for example, is building several Windows-based handheld applications for Stage Stores Inc., including those for inventory, receiving, carton scanning and merchandise transfer. The applications are set to be finished in July, said Jeff Kish, CIO at the Houston-based apparel retailer, which operates 540 stores in more than 30 states. Over the past several years, TopCoder also has built a system for Stage to handle the sale of gift cards online and another for managing product returns, he added.

"Their virtual sourcing model is probably the next step in the evolution beyond offshore sourcing," Kish said in an interview at the TopCoder tournament. "You can look at the competitions week after week and see how the developers are scoring. This is the quality level of the person that will work on my project. If you offshore something, you may understand the project manager, but you have no way of understanding the quality of the resources below that level."

In addition to assessing the quality of the developers through the competitions and the rating system, Kish said, TopCoder's methodology is geared toward ensuring that the outcome of the work meshes with his business requirements.