Featured Pitch: 8KMiles
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Web Site: www.8kmiles.com
Headquarters: Santa Clara, CA
Year Founded: April 2009
Founder: Dr. Suresh V. Chari, CEO
Investors: Bootstrapped
Employees: 20
Company Description in 140 characters or less:“8KMiles offers on-demand workforce, cloud-based IT and collaboration tools enabling businesses to create their own virtual company online.”
By Dr. Suresh V. Chari
Outsourcing emerged in 1989, which brought about a major tipping point and revolutionized the way business was done. Throughout the 90s, outsourcing was characterized by big business and complicated, multi-party contracts. However, these earlier deals lacked resources and visibility, often resulting in discontent, restructure or even failure.
Because of this paradigm shift, the benefits of enterprise scalability and on-demand infrastructure are now becoming a reality for new players, such as start-ups and SMBs. As a result, online outsourcing is becoming an increasingly attractive alternative and gaining momentum among SMBs and start-ups, especially in an environment where cost pressures are high and capital is low.
Launched in April 2009, 8KMiles, which takes its name from the diameter of the Earth, applies the outsourcing model to a virtual environment. Coined by some experts as Outsourcing as a Service, 8KMiles launched with a mission to help small businesses and start-ups to outsource tasks by connecting them with a community of service providers that specialize in everything from software development through to legal and accounting advice.
Unlike the big outsourcing giants, 8KMiles is servicing SMBs and start-ups to help them take advantage of cloud computing economics and real world IT outsourcing, essentially allowing SMBs and start-ups to set up a global business online without any footprint in the real world. This allows SMBs and start-ups to squeeze as much as possible out of seed money and tight budgets, instead of ramping up on-site staff or investing in expensive on-site software or hardware. The cloud computing automates many different tasks and helps save enterprises huge amounts of money on hardware and software infrastructure. However, it is still difficult for small and medium sized companies to manage the cloud based services using the self service component of the cloud.
Through 8KMiles’ on-demand workforce, user-friendly infrastructure and collaboration tools in the cloud, start-ups and SMBs can easily and cost-effectively outsource their projects online and in a secure way.
The 8KMiles platform offers SMBs and start-ups:
- Secure cloud-based Virtual Computing Environment (based on Amazon EC2)
- A marketplace for hiring talent, including background check and skills testing
- Project management tools and online collaboration tools including video conferencing and instant messaging They offer service providers:
- A network to showcase talent for potential customers
- An integrated infrastructure to carry out the client projects
The approach is simple. Through 8KMiles’ vast network of highly-skilled professionals and cloud computing infrastructure and services, SMBs and start-ups can safely and securely outsource their projects online with complete visibility and control. Companies simply log-in, create their profile, search and select highly-skilled staff for their projects and then lease virtual company infrastructure, cloud-based software and ready to use development environments, on an hourly pay-as-you-go basis, with no upfront costs. But the service goes further, offering a collaborative platform for projects. With browser-based tools, SMBs and start-ups can attack and manage projects with video conferences, message boards, and more. Users can even install their own tools in the Windows Server and various Linux environments offered through the 8KMiles marketplace.
The simplification and model of collaboration that the cloud offers to the outsourcing industry not only offers huge cost savings for SMBs and start-ups, it also offers greater revenue generating opportunities for seasoned IT and business development professionals as well. Through 8KMiles, IT professionals and business development professionals are able to sign up as service brokers and create their own Virtual Company. They can then connect with other professionals within the 8KMiles marketplace with specific domain knowledge or skill sets, team up and then offer services as a specialist project team, enabling them to work on high-value projects and sell value-added services to a variety of companies within the marketplace.
8KMiles also provides intuitive dashboards for service brokers, enabling them to effectively manage the accounts and their pipeline, arming them with all the tools and communications mechanisms required to ensure a successful project. Through 8KMiles, service brokers can earn attractive compensation by negotiating rates with their service providers and also reselling the virtual computing offered through 8KMiles. 8KMiles is made up of a team of 20 people who are based in Silicon Valley, Dallas and India. The company currently has two revenue streams. One is through commissions based on the project contract value, currently 7.5% of the value of the project executed through 8KMiles’ portal. The second is through subscriptions to its Virtual Computing Environment based on the hours of use.By leveraging recent advances and the disruptive nature of cloud computing, 8KMiles is not only allowing SMBs and start-ups to circumvent the risk and heavy capital investment historically required to starting and running a business today, it is leveling the playing field. 8KMiles brings an entirely new dimension to operating lean and new promise for SMBs and start-ups looking to get ahead without the overhead.
8KMiles - www.8kmiles.com
