Homegrown – IT outsourcing options sprout up across rural America.

Aelera Corp. CEO Dustin Crane traveled to China, India and Armenia in a quest to buy or start up an offshore IT services company. After six months of searching, he returned to the U.S. and set up operations in the coastal city of Savannah and the smaller town of Fitzgerald, Ga., population 8,758.

McKesson Corp. CIO Cheryl T. Smith estimates that the $8 billion pharmaceutical distributor is saving $10 million annually in salary costs—a percentage of which is reinvested in IT innovation—after relocating its primary data center and about 75 IT jobs from San Francisco to Dubuque, Iowa.

Mattel Inc. CIO Joe Eckroth figures the cost of outsourcing certain Web-based software development to IT professionals at Rural Sourcing Inc. (RSI) in Jonesboro, Ark., is about a third of what he’d pay a comparable IT services firm in a major metropolitan area.

Welcome to the ever-so-nascent world of rural IT sourcing. Both large and small companies are tapping into a highly skilled but often underemployed IT workforce in lower-cost rural areas—frequently as an alternative to shipping work overseas.

News Story by Julia King

Full Story: http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/outsourcing/story/0,10801,100632,00.html