Outsourcing has been a growing business throughout most of the 1990s, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Originally, the practice was limited primarily to the operations and data-center activities within organizations; it's worth remembering, for example, that outsourcing of data-center activities was essentially the beginning of Ross Perot's EDS empire back in the 1970s. But now we're seeing the outsourcing concept expand into the application development arena, which means that it affects the day-to-day lives of the software professionals and managers who read the Cutter IT Journal.