WHY OUTSOURCE IN THE FIRST PLACE?

The practice of IT outsourcing is not limited to a certain industry, nature of business, or size of business. IT outsourcing is present in banking and finance, utility services, production and distribution, health care, retail, and even broadcast media. The practice has already become a norm so much so that one can seldom find a company that has not outsourced hardware or software which it utilizes in its operations. Reasons for IT outsourcing are varied as the type of businesses it can be utilized in. Flower retail and distribution company, Island Rose went into IT outsourcing to allow them to personalize and tailor-fit IT software and hardware akin to their needs. Island Rose Founder and Marketing Director, Dustin Andaya, disclosed that IT outsourcing has allowed them to pick from a pool of talent of vendors, allowing them to have people dedicated to certain fields, giving more depth to their work and operations.

"If we hired a programmer, his expertise might be limited to certain programming languages or platform as opposed to outsourcing from an IT firm that can give us many options to choose from," says Andaya who has outsourced services such as web design and development, programming, and other cloud services such as hosting, data management and storage, and software as a service.

For utilities third-party payment receiver CIS Bayad Center, variation of outsourced services and software are favored over inhouse IT specialists. CIS Bayad IT Planning Officer, Joewe Cinco recalls that the increase of Bayad Center sites and merchants prompted them to "tap software providers who had available pool of aspects" to provide what their business required and "eliminate wasteful steps and procedures in hiring or developing internal skills which the company did not have."

Power distribution company, Manila Electric Company (Meralco) also believes in the convenience outsourcing brings, but has larger faith on outsourcing identified as "smart sourcing." "With smart sourcing, you define what service and service level you need done and get it out of your way," narrates Meralco Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Marthyn Cuan. "When they deliver, it's turn-key already. [The vendor] will monitor whenever a fault is about to occur, do maintenance for you, and if there's anything else that you want to ask them to perform on top of whatever they're already doing, then that's simply a request." Smart sourcing, apart from low level outsourcing, means a company can cover multiple assets; covering service level agreements, not just transactional operations. "It's more of getting an entire stack, moving it out, and managing your risk at the same time," says Cuan.