Review the benefits of working with an offshore software center and be ready to take the next step! Are you ready to invest in your business?

Decades 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 in 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, experience and technology stack 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 that there are great advantages in working with offshore development teams, you will also realize that most of the problems and disadvantages will be specifically related to the potential engineering risks. We recommend reading this article to get a better understanding of the key factors that you should look at before making a hasty decision.

OUTSOURCING TOP BENEFITS

We have broken down the main benefits of outsourcing your software development needs to the right partner into the following:

1. REDUCED INFRASTRUCTURE COSTS

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 a team of your own. Besides the obvious reduction of costs at the facilities and equipment level, salaries may also greatly affect your budget. However, keep in mind that cheaper labor does not always guarantee cheaper solutions or high engineering standards. You should be focused on saving time and effort but should never want to compromise on the quality of your product.

2. EASE RECRUITING BY DELEGATING AND SCALING THE TEAM 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 making a wise offshore software development choice, of course.

3. REDUCE RISK, EXTRAORDINARY STANDARDS

Innovation and quality are the main concerns of outsourcing companies. Depending on your requirements, you can get highly qualified professionals 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 overlap between 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 business 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 change that cannot be applied on production servers during daytime work hours but must be done overnight.

If you only have a local team, it would require your team to work extra hours during the off-hours 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 SCALING YOUR BUSINESS

When your business is not IT expert, having to deal with your own IT department imposes a tremendous operating 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 the relevant 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 if it is tackled by your own IT department. (Do not miss this: Software Engineering | Price vs. Quality?).

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.

7. NO NEED TO SETUP NEW INFRASTRUCTURE

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. This includes not just hiring a team, but also building an effective engineering culture. Project start-up can take off more quickly if you do not need to consider the infrastructure and the setup of your own development center.

8. SCALING THE TECH TEAM

You may be familiar with scaling in terms of hardware infrastructure. It is also an important factor with software development teams. And it is particularly enabled by using offshore development.

Your business may not require the same resources all the time. There might be a phase of your product and service development that require a greater number of expert resources to work on it, and then you could achieve a level of maturity that makes it unnecessary to continue with the same highly qualified professionals.

At this point, you may decide to shrink the team or switch roles and positions to a more operative level, or a new technology focus. This degree of management flexibility in IT resources could be tremendously complex when dealing directly with the hiring of personnel, instead of delegating all this to your offshore development center.

SUMMARY

Although most benefits you get from working with an offshore software development center would certainly lead to a reduction in cost, by delving deeper into the benefits, you will realize that it is not only a matter of budget. Even with equal or greater costs, the expertise, scalability and specialization that you can have when you consider outsourcing software development, allows you to focus on your company’s main goals. These 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.