How to choose the right company for IT outsourcing services
For the past few years, our world has been faced with a fast increase in companies offering outsourcing software development services. Today a lot of organizations farm out jobs from their home countries to other ones.
Why do they do it? The answer is pretty simple: in order to cut costs. Many companies are transferring financial, administrative, accounting, customer service jobs to international markets.
This practice is very popular in the USA, especially what concerns IT outsourcing. To hire developers in the own country isn’t a bad choice, of course: in most cases, a client receives a product of the highest quality, but generally, this way is cost-intensive.
So, an organization has to look around and analyze international markets in the search of good services at reasonable prices, all the more there are a plenty of opportunities to do it, and thus optimize development costs and save quality.
Search process of a company providing IT outsourcing services usually looks like writing “the best outsourcing software development companies” in Google. Another popular way to find an effective solution is to look through catalogs.
There are numerous business listings focused on certain locations (European, American etc.) having different categories where a client can find a company providing outsourcing software development services, see its rating, estimate clients’ testimonials, location and so on. It can be something like Europages, Clutch, Businessmagnet, and Yelp.
After finding several options it will be reasonable to make a small analysis: to have a look at company’s website, portfolio, social media pages, visit blog and have a look which topics a company covers and in what way, and, finally, to write several companies about future project ideas and wait for response to be able to make the right choice.
This way allows to come across with the right IT outsourcing company.
Now we’ve come to an important issue: which countries offer the best IT outsourcing services. If a company allocates in the USA, how it should choose between India, Vietnam, Europe, Argentina, South Africa, and a plenty of other options?
As at the beginning a client often must decide which country or region to choose, and only then define a company itself. There are a lot of cultural, religious, mentalities’ differences among countries which have a great impact on the way people do their work.
For example, Israelis won’t be developing your product on Saturday if it’s necessary to do on the weekend (in IT sphere it’s a common situation).
It’s very important and difficult to avoid of existing stereotypes (e.g., that hiring developers from India, you will definitely save a lot of money), taking into account various opinions and experience of other companies. So, we’re going to talk about them.
Probably, among the most popular countries and regions for outsourcing software development services are such countries as India, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Europe (to be more detailed, Eastern Europe, where we have first of all Czech Republic, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine).
When a company is in a decision-making process, it should take into consideration such characteristics as communication skills, technical competency and experience, clients’ testimonials, its budget, a scale of the project, time zone, work approach, and other factors.
Let’s start with India, as there are lots of references and opinions that it provides the cheapest IT outsourcing services. So, it seems to be the most cost-effective variant.
Generally, the development process starts with client’s requirements to the project and their analysis, and Indian specialists tend to say “yes” to everything and give the impression that they can do everything without delays, but sometimes it’s not the case.
Yes, India is a cheap destination for outsourcing software development services, but it has some weak points. First of all, linguistic skills generally aren’t very good (we imply English). Then, a team of developers doesn’t always meet deadlines, making necessary improvements.
Peter Ingram, IT director at Addison Lee, shared his experience of working with Indian and Russian developers: “The guys in India said yes to everything, copied the mistakes we had deliberately put in there, and didn’t ask us anything about the business.
The team in Russia looked at our proposition, asked if it was functional, noticed the mistakes and asked us why we did things in this way. They really challenged us and had much better engagement.” Nevertheless, India provides cheap (comparing to other destinations) services, and for not very complicated projects it can be a very effective solution.
Eastern Europe. It’s a big region including such countries as Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, south of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria.
We won’t be covering all these countries as, first, they are similar to some extent and second, the article will be very, very long.) So, we’ll consider Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, and Belarus, the most popular for IT outsourcing.
A few words about Poland and Ukraine. These destinations also have some pros and cons. Technical skills are high (in most cases), and English is better (in comparison with India). But there are also some weak points.
First of all, language skills vary depending on a company. What do we mean: yes, they are practically always higher than in India, but some IT outsourcing companies need to improve English of developers themselves so that all members of the development team would be able to speak fluent English. The second point is money as the prices here are higher than in India.
Czech Republic. It offers reliable solutions at reasonable prices. The expertise and experience of developers are high, and companies do their best to provide customers with high-quality products and services, meeting deadlines and working hard. There are some language barriers, but they try to solve this problem by having at least 2 specialists with fluent English.
Belarus is considered to be a Silicon Valley of the countries which were a part of the Soviet Union. At present moment it has one of the lowest rates in Europe for economic reasons such as paying lower taxes and government support.
The situation with linguistic skills and technical competency is similar to Ukraine. To improve the language of developers companies provide them with English courses, often with the emphasis on spoken language. High technical skills and quality of services explain the popularity of this outsourcing software development destination.
Our company is situated in Belarus, while the other office is located in the United Kingdom which helps us cover different regions and offer our clients cost-efficient solutions.
As for many other Belarusian IT companies, distance and time zone isn’t a problem for us. How do we exactly solve this issue? We form a dedicated project team for each client, and one team works for one client’s projects exclusively.
For your better understanding, we’ll give the definition: a dedicated project team is a team of specialists (developers, a project manager, designers, marketing specialists) needed and gathered especially for the projects of one client, and a number of members depend on the scale and complexity of tasks).
It should be noted that India was (and continues to be) one of the most popular countries for IT outsourcing, but for the past 6-7 years, it has faced great competition. Today Eastern Europe is one of the major players (and probably, even number one) in the outsourcing software development game.
Also, such destinations as Vietnam and Pakistan have been gaining popularity due to its lower prices (we won’t be considering them because of their similarity with India as the main points are the same). Now we’re going to explain why a great number of companies prefer to outsource to Eastern Europe.
So, three main reasons to choose Eastern Europe for outsourcing software development services:
- High technical competency of developers including their experience and expertise.
- The golden mean between the quality of IT outsourcing services and prices (lower outsourcing software development costs (f.e. than in the USA) and a higher quality of services than in India).
- Convenient time zone and similar culture. Eastern Europe covers various countries with different time zones and cultural peculiarities, so it’s easy to choose the most appropriate variant.
Moreover, nowadays providing a dedicated project team for a client is becoming a widespread service in Eastern Europe, meaning that their members conform to customer’s working hours (if needed).
We hope we managed to give you useful information which would allow you to choose the right region and company for IT outsourcing.