THE DOT-COM INDUSTRY has certainly left an imprint on the stock market, job market, and IT investment and implementation models. Now outsourcing vendors can be added to the list of industry segments feeling the squeeze of the recent dot-com tailspin.

Once happy to ride shotgun aboard dot-coms' meteoric ascent and to pour their services into the startup channel, outsourcers paid little attention to the focused needs of larger, complex enterprise customers.

However, leverage is starting to shift back to those large customers who can afford to patiently seek out tailored outsourced services that address their specific needs.

"To be sure, some of the fly-by-night dot-coms have disappeared from our radar screen," says Mitch Kristofferson, vice president of marketing at San Carlos, Calif.-based Corio. "We have to go where we find business."

Kristofferson acknowledges that Corio relied heavily on the speed-to-market option that dot-coms provided the outsourcer during its first two years of business.

But expertise in offering ready-made applications in a matter of weeks was of little importance to larger customers requiring greater software functionality customization and infrastructure support.

"It's not that out-of-the-box isn't valuable to those large customers -- it is," Kristofferson remarks. "But to get an organization of that magnitude to change its legacy processes [quickly] isn't practical. They have to scale to make that investment."

To help ease that transition, Corio has enlisted the aid of system integrators such as Arthur Andersen, Cap Gemini, and Ernst and Young as partners to gain critical integration know-how and to help sell large organizations on the idea of outsourcing while Corio handles the technology implementation end.

Kristofferson says Corio's recent launch of its Intelligent Infrastructure product is an attempt to package its infrastructure services in a method that meets larger enterprises' needs. He adds that the number of outsourcing inquiries received by Corio from large enterprises skyrocketed from zero last year to comprising the bulk of its current pipeline.

The primary hurdle for outsourcing has been the lack of interaction between outsourced and in-house applications, says Arthur Williams, director of IT management and services at Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga Information Group.

Williams says ASP (application service provider) vendors that hawk software applications have matured to the point

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