Review the benefits of working with an offshore software development center and take the next step! Are you ready to invest in your business?
A decade ago, software outsourcing was seen as an attractive option for enterprises that wanted to lower operational costs overall when the purpose of the organization was not primarily focused on the IT industry. Nowadays, as the demand for IT resources continues to increase exponentially, offshore software development may be the only acceptable course of action.
There are several articles on the Internet about the advantages and problems when considering an Offshore Development Center (ODC), though most of them focus only on 3 main factors: the budget, the confidence, and the commitment of the selected company. In this article, we will review the benefits of working with an offshore software development center in addition to broadly discussing these 3 topics.
Once you are convinced of the benefits of working with these sorts of companies, you will also realize that most of the problems and disadvantages will be specifically related to the risks at the moment when choosing the right partner. For that matter, we recommend reading this article. So, let’s move on…
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Outsourcing key benefits
The main benefits that can be achieved by outsourcing your software development can be broken down into the following:
1. Reduce costs in salaries and infrastructure
As we mentioned above, this may be the main concern to take into account when deciding to contract a service instead of building and working with one of your own. Besides the obvious reduction of costs at the facilities and for equipment, the salaries may greatly affect your budget.
Even when working with the same level of qualified professionals, there may be significant differences in the overall salaries paid overseas when looking at countries recognized for their software development centers.
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2. Ease recruiting by delegating and expanding the search across the globe
Recruiting and staffing are getting harder with the increasing demand worldwide. Outsourcing removes this problem almost completely while providing you with the best professionals around the world, depending on your offshore software development of choice, of course.
3. You get innovation and quality
Innovation and quality are the main concerns of outsourcing companies. Depending on your requirements, you can get highly qualified software engineers following the highest standards in software development. If you need to build a team of your own with the same level of quality, you would either have to contract very expensive resources (which may not be available at all), or you would need to invest in training that could take young professionals years to become as productive as a senior professional with several years of experience.
4. Time zone differences working with people overseas
This is a benefit or a problem depending on how you look at it. It is always desirable to have some overlapping between the local and remote work hours so you can meet and resolve issues quickly. Besides that, you may greatly benefit from having a team with some hours ahead or behind your local time.
If your teams have a reasonable time difference (i.e., 4-6 hours) that allows some overlapping, but also have some work hours outside your local time, you can tackle issues that have arisen at the end of your day and work on them, outside of your business hours. When working only with on-site resources you need to work overnight in order to introduce changes without interrupting key services that are being used during business hours.
Having your own IT department, collaborating with an offshore software development team located in a different time zone eases the implementation of a 24-hour development cycle, which allows you to catch up more quickly with the requirements and changes that are greatly affected by real-time actions (which are typical for online solutions that are being used worldwide). Suppose you have to implement a chance that cannot be applied on production servers during the day work hours but overnight.
If you only have a local team, it would require your team to work extra hours during the midnight implementation. But if you also have an offshore team working 4-6 hours ahead or behind your time zone, then your changes could be implemented by this offshore team during their normal work hours.
5. You can focus on your business
When your business is not IT per se, having to deal with your own IT department imposes a tremendous operative cost when handled as a completely separate area. Most of the time, you come upon a cost-benefit trade-off at the moment of implementing a given feature into your business. If your IT department is not skilled enough in software technologies or if it does not have the required additional resources, your options to determine how to implement a new feature will be restricted by these limitations.
In this case, chances are that you end up with a suboptimal solution that could be tackled by your own IT department.
6. Shared responsibility
Risk management in software development is usually underestimated by most non-IT companies. When deciding to outsource a given component, the parties agree on what has to be done, and the impact and risk management is shared among them. Managing and mitigating the risks produced by the development can be handled better by the offshore company as it is part of its core business to do so. An outsourcing company will apply the best practices in order to minimize possible risks that could arise.
7. No new infrastructure required
One huge advantage of hiring an offshore software development company is that you do not need to create and manage a development team at all. Project start-up can takeoff more quickly if you do not need to consider the infrastructure and the setup of your own development center.
8. Auto-scaling the IT team
Although this term refers mostly to scaling in hardware infrastructure, it is also an important factor introduced by offshore development.
Your business may not require the same resources all the time. There might be a phase of your products and services that requires a greater number of expert resources to work on, and then you could achieve a level of maturity that makes it unnecessary to continue with the same level of higher qualified professionals.
At this point, you may decide to shrink the team or switch roles and positions to a more operative level. This degree of management of IT resources could be tremendously complex when dealing directly with the hiring of personnel, instead of delegating all this to your offshore development center.
To sum up
Although most benefits you get from working with an offshore software development center would certainly impact on the reduction of costs, by delving deeper into the benefits, one will realize that it is not only a matter of budget. Even with equal or greater costs, the expertise and specialization that you can have when you consider outsourcing software, allowing you to focus on your company’s main goals, are certainly key factors to consider.
Are you searching for the best technical solution for your company? Do not hesitate to contact us for more information. We will get back to you!
