How to go Offshore?

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Offshore Software Programming is not a common terminology for organizations having no or little exposure to the Offshore Outsourcing business. These organizations face a fundamental question while implementing the offshore software development strategy : How do I go offshore? It’s very simple.

Here’s the process to go offshore in a very straightforward way.

1. Evaluate your Vendor: Trial Project
2. Develop a Project Based Relationship
3. Dedicated Teams
4. Joint Venture

1. Evaluate your Vendor: Trial Project

Of course with the competition growing in the upward direction in services market providing offshore software programming services, it’s very tedious to decide upon your offshore software development vendor. And hence as said, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, it is better and safer to ensure your vendor’s capabilities by awarding him a trial project and measuring his efficiencies on the basis of the same. Vendor evaluation processes are laid down by some companies, which you can follow to evaluate your vendor.

2. Develop a Project Based Relationship

After satisfactory evaluation of the vendor on your personal parameters, you can go ahead and start outsourcing your projects to him. Gradually over a period of time, even bigger projects can be outsourced to the same vendor. This relationship can help you tremendously, once into good shape in terms of business. Because outsourcing to, say, Software Development Centers in India, can help you cut down your costs to almost more than 50% due to the Offshore advantage, in the long run, and let you concentrate on your core competencies.

3. Dedicated Teams

As and when you start outsourcing your projects that are incremental in nature, you can opt for working with a dedicated team from the vendor. This will enable you having a completely dedicated team working exclusively for your projects. You can decide upon the number of persons who should be assigned to your team, depending on the size, scope and frequency of your projects. This helps you in:

• Better control over the team/development processes.
• Choosing and grooming your team for continuous projects. You can cash in on the relationship with the development team and their prior experience in your projects/processes to your advantage.
• Further cost savings compared to the project prices.

4. Joint Venture

Ensured of the whole process going smoothly and as desired, you can now go a step further and establish a joint venture with the offshore vendor with whom you have worked with on a project basis until now. This is the simplest and probably the safest way to make an entry into offshore software development centers like India. Some advantages to this approach include:

• Further offshore savings.
• Access to funding from the vendor country.
• Enhancing shareholder value by way of expanding operations to other countries while improving margins.
• Taking advantage of subsidiary/other incentives provided by vendor country including tax holidays.