Playing B2B Matchmaker

Executives at VertiCity, based here, say that during pilot testing, the company found the greatest demand came from customers looking for someone to build them an e-commerce site.

"They may say they want one [similar to another seen online]," says Jeff Mason, CEO of VertiCity. "Or they want two pieces of software integrated."

Mason, who spent 30 years at IBM prior to launching VertiCity, encourages buyers to write multiphased requests for proposal (RFPs) rather than a single, million-dollar bid. Similarly, VertiCity's sellers,its developer fleet,typically package their work in chunks, "so both parties get money flowing in increments," he says.

"I think we would go back [to VertiCity's services]," says Sachin Chaudhry, principal of StudentOnline.com, a New York start-up that offers a Web-based application for college faculty and students.

VertiCity led StudentOnline.com to Astata, a company that develops and hosts wireless applications. Astata wrote a wireless component for StudentOnline.com's application so that users can access the site with handheld devices such as PDAs or a cell phone.

"We got something like 30 bids, and we filtered out the bids that were potentially way too high [in cost]," Chaudhry says. "From five or six bids, we narrowed it down to one. [The choice] was a little price-conscious, but we also had a deadline for when we needed to roll out the application,the fall semester," he adds.

VertiCity hires developers from outside the United States to work on retainer for U.S. companies, Mason says. Roughly half of the company's stable of developers live and work in Asia, he says.

"The [overseas] person that we would charge [customers] $2,000 a month for probably has eight to 10 years of experience and a master's in computer science," Mason says, adding that an American with those credentials could command as much as $8,000 per month, or nearly $100,000 annually.

VertiCity is not the first exchange to focus on matching buyers and sellers of IT services. Ajunto, ITsquare and other newcomers are tapping the potentially lucrative vein as well.