Outsourcing is definitely a familiar concept, however, to brush it up again, off shore outsourcing basically means the companies in US or other countries send work to countries like India, China, Philippines and so on. It is a very common practice as it has several advantages and of them cheap labor is the chief one. Nevertheless, with every advancement in the technology would lead to a new possibility and so is the case with crowdsourcing. Well, crowdsourcing basically means a process through which several people can give solutions for the problem. Hence, it is a collective effort of several people across the borders. One of the best examples of crowdsourcing is the famous Wikipedia. It accommodates content from everyone across the world.

For a better understanding of this term let me quote Wikipedia itself, “Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.”
India has shared the reputation of being a back office for several of US and UK based companies. This new boom of crowdsourcing has definitely set the minds of many IT experts here thinking about the risk it poses to outsourcing.

However, a clear answer of ‘no’ is obtained by taking into consideration several factors. First of all, crowdsourcing cannot be applied for all types of work. This would surely retain the power of offshore outsourcing intact. For instance, a call center work cannot be done by using crowdsourcing as the work requires having a proper tangible infrastructure, domain expertise, and business skills and so on. One also requires a trained staff to handle the calls which is possible through outsourcing only and not crowdsourcing. This clarifies that outsourcing is not at much risk with the coming of crowdsourcing.