The trend in online staffing and service providers targeting the enterprise market continues. Elance, one of the largest online staffing firms, announced today it's rolling out an offering for enterprise-level users called "Private Talent Cloud."

“Elance's Private Talent Cloud is consistent with an emerging trend: more online platform players, such as Work Market and others, starting to address the mid-large enterprise market, not just small businesses,” said Andrew Karpie, affiliate analyst at Staffing Industry Analysts.

“It is more challenging to penetrate and serve the enterprise segment, and it's also the space where there can be more competition for share with traditional staffing," Karpie said. "Up to this point, online (virtual) workers and their services have remained outside the boundaries of the existing contingent workforce supply chain processes (VMS, MSP, etc.). If the Elance offering can make a major breakthrough into the enterprise segment, then online (virtual) workers — talent-as-a-service — may be more difficult to ignore from the standpoint of contingent workforce management in some larger enterprises.”

Private Talent Cloud provides a special access portal for building and managing private talent pools. Prior to Private Talent Cloud, all Elance users on the labor-demand-side used the same standard Elance process and interface to hire freelancers.

“Now, through the Private Talent Cloud, managing your extended workforce is as easy as managing your social network,” said Fabio Rosati, CEO of Elance. “Hiring managers can engage with the best external talent in real time, gaining access to the resources they need to win the war for talent while retaining enterprise-level visibility and control.”

The online staffing provider has been developing the service for the past 18 months and has a couple of dozen customers using it pre-launch.

“We supplement our core team with a network of talented freelancers from around the world, which can be a lot to manage,” said Julie Clarenbach, editorial manager at The Motley Fool. “Our Private Talent Cloud has dramatically improved how we manage and pay our freelance network — plus, we’re keeping our best talent more productive which makes us more competitive.”