Offshore Product Development – The Competitive Advantage

From a start-up to established software development company, everyone wants decline in product realization time. They constantly work towards upgrading and extending product offerings, boost up skills and capabilities, speed up product development and lower down costs. To stand out in the ever-changing market and achieve greater ROI (Return on Investment), they need to implement smarter strategies to get the best out of available resources.

Taking this in mind, the Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) today not only need advanced features in new products, but also want them faster, it is vital that they pay close attention towards capitalizing on a partnership with a leading offshore development company to take competitive advantage, achieve more time-to-market and lower down their primary investment in terms of money, time and efforts. The most important among these is the fact that to stay competitive, an established offshore software development company can assist enterprises and ISVs to achieve it well.

Offshore Product Development (OPD):

Offshore product development allows software companies and enterprises to lower their development costs substantially and focus comprehensively on strategic initiatives such as marketing products and developing them to the next level. Companies opting for OPD can release their products faster than their competitors taking benefit of time zone difference and 24 hours development leading to competitive advantage.

Competitive Advantage:

Globalization, increasing cost pressures, changing market dynamics, the need for faster time to market and many other factors has led many product companies to opt for offshore software product development.

Software product companies, enterprises can experience competitive advantage in following way:

• High Quality of unified coding standard
• Faster Releases to the Market
• Significant reduction in operations and manpower costs
• Maximizing productivity of internal team and resources while actual development and QA is being outsourced
• Increase in project visibility and profitability due to reduced investment overall
• Reduced people management issues as the team developing the application are managed at their end with no involvement of the client
• Time difference advantage leading to development window of more than 20 hours
• Handling future needs of the customer like support and upgrades

Evaluation of Software Vendor:

Decide first exactly what you want – The most essential thing to do is to gather accurate, thorough requirements of your software to be developed. It should align with your business goals.

Verify software vendor’s background – Check out the software provider’s certificates and credentials. Verify how long they have been in the business. Whether the vendor is growing or downsizing. Check out product, geography based client references with complete clarity.

Scalability of the Software Solution – Client should verify the scalability solutions suggested by the vendor for the software solution to be developed, with their targeted goals. Verification of any hidden or additional fees within the proposal.

Sign a software Contract - Make sure you sign an NDA and an SDA (software development agreement) with your software partner

Data Security and Intellectual Property – Agreement should clearly mention the custody of data and intellectual property in case of disagreements and project shelves.

Test Drive – Check the vendor capabilities by sample project before committing to the actual contract.

Key Performance indicators – Mutually decide on what would be key performance indicators before signing a contract.

Software Product Vendor Selection Criteria:

Whether you have an idea to be endorsed, a product to be built, or fine tune the performance of an existing product, the remote teams should be able to handle situations wherever needed in software product development life cycle. Offshore software vendor should have a history of proven track record and expertise to improve your application to boost your business.

Offshore Product Development vendor should provide its services across the entire life cycle to the enterprises. They should be in a position to provide innovative solutions to complex product development situations by combining technical expertise, domain experience and process maturity. This enables clients to gain competitive advantage by surpassing competitors and by improving the revenue streams.

Their product development services should rank high on performance, security, maintainability, scalability and span across relevant verticals of the clients.

Offshore software product vendor should be experienced in dealing with end-to-end product development, enabling you to focus on your core business. Such vendors support and help enterprises across the globe to speed up the deliverables and reduce the overall development cost. They should provide the following outsourced software product development services to businesses:

Product Development

Software Vendor should provide end-to-end product development services right from architecture design to release. They need to be familiar with both partial and full product life cycle development based on your requirements and specific needs.

Product Enhancement

ISV (independent software vendor) can help bring about product improvements and additional features based on the client’s market demand unique needs.

Product Migration

Vendor should be able to work on your migration projects involving entire process of fully developed client-server product to web-based technology, smart devices, and mobile-responsiveness and compliance from old technology to new technology platforms.

Product Testing

Assurance of product quality by being your third party testing team. Software Vendor should provide end to end testing process from unit and modular testing to performance and integrated functionality testing

Product Maintenance

Software vendor should be equipped to provide product maintenance services too to ensure smooth post implementation support which very critical.

Companies who manage to develop higher levels of productivity in product development compared to their peers enjoy a well-documented competitive advantage in the marketplace. Because productivity is essentially defined as the amount of output per unit of effort put in, companies who can find a means to develop great products while containing product development costs enjoy a distinct advantage in terms of market share and profitability.

Future Of Offshore Software Development

Offshore outsourcing is a very popular global business model that ranges from Fortune 500 to small companies. The model has proven to be a highly effective method for increasing efficiency, lowering operational costs by leveraging offshore expertise, and offering expert technical advice.

In IT consultancy, outsourcing management can help you save capital, time, and infrastructure, giving the business a competitive advantage.

One more essential aspect you must ensure that offshore software development communication is seamless and uninterruptible. The competition will expand as the economy continues to globalize – making it much more difficult for generalists to succeed. By focusing on a particular niche, this would be the impetus for many to specialize and distinguish.

The demand for offshore software development will be more varied in the coming year than ever before, both in terms of team location and the skills/expertise they can offer.

Contact Radixweb – a leading offshore development company now to build your next software project.