Thanks to Nicola (our resident ebullient South African and newsletter editor) for highlighting this article where I also found a piece called called Outsourcing's own Long Tail. It is about "selling more of less" of course...but how does this phenomenon impact outsourcing?

Globalisation means services can be delivered from and to anywhere and historically people would flock to the low-cost high-skills centres like India - or increasingly places like China, Philippines or Ukraine. I even had contact from someone with a centre in Sri Lanka recently.

The study quoted in the first article found that "small entrepreneurial companies are more likely to initiate offshoring of high-value functions than large corporations. Forty-eight percent of the companies with fewer than 500 employees reported that their first offshoring initiative involved product development, innovation or engineering as compared to 16% in the case of large companies".