Outsourcing has moved away from the early days of specific application development towards the entire gamut of designing and developing entire custom software programs of advanced complexities. Development outsourcing is now exploring new territories which include a spectrum of areas like financial services, retail services, transcription services, pharmaceuticals and e-governance. The highly sought offshore software development in India, has witnessed immense growth.
The outsourcing model has provided companies with significant benefits to bring in service providers without investing in fixed operational costs and employee recruitment. Global giants benefit the most by outsourcing their needs. Outsourcing software development has fast-tracked the world toward IT enablement and there is scarcely a country on planet earth which it has not impacted in some way. This increasing collaboration has blurred geographical boundaries and made the world a global marketplace.
Driven by the proven and distinct advantage in software development outsourcing, most industry giants have established full-fledged offices in developing nations. To name a few – Microsoft, Google, HP, SAP, Intel, Sun, Oracle, IBM, Dell, Apple Computers… the list goes on. The fact that many of these are rapidly expanding their offshore facilities is testimony to the benefits in quality of software development obtained and the efficiency of their outsourcing establishments. The primary benefit is a quality product at a significant cost benefit. Initially there were apprehensions about quality because of differences in perception, culture and working practices. But these have long been successfully overcome with closer communication in a collaborative environment and better supervision.
A successful philosophy is to smoothly integrate an onshore local project management with an offshore application development team, which ensures constant dependable communication to produce highly competitive products.
To summarize, software development outsourcing provides the following benefits – Quicker development and start up – Reduced cost – Reliability – Better performance – Increased productivity – A well-managed e-business infrastructure – A more efficient backend environment – A competitive edge with no or little capital investment.
Hence we can say that outsourcing is here to stay. These are sufficiently compelling reasons to justify outsourcing software development where the results have more than supported such decisions. With an overall economic slowdown, a shift to outsourcing is being sought beyond the usual tangible benefits of cost saving. In a much larger context the significant intangible benefit are the value addition that a company builds up through this process, in terms of getting the best expertise, and the assurance of unbeatable product quality. Many experts believe that outsourcing, already here to stay, is poised for enormous growth to irreversibly change the way business works.