Bespoke Software Development
Keeping up the pace with technological progress and development of new IT solutions is becoming crucial point for companies maintaining and striving for competitive position in the marketplace.
The more such system is customized for the structure of the company the more benefits gains the company: grows efficiency in the workplace, customer service and management control. In long term markets the risks are high and time to market is crucial.
There are two ways for companies to reach their IT goals: to integrate and customize the packaged solution or to develop a custom solution from the ground up to most accurately fit your requirements. Packaged software is intended for plenty of companies with diverse activities. Thus to have this solution exactly fit your needs it may require customization of the packaged version. The main point is how far will customization go to reach the point when a bespoke software development becomes an acceptable alternative and to which extent software can be customized as the end result could be more expensive but still customized sub-optimal system.
If you choose bespoke software it may be quite expensive to carry this out entirely in the UK. This factor often caused many of these companies to make the choice between meeting the requirements exactly and sticking to budgets rigidly.
As of current situation the availability of offshore development has made bespoke software development an affordable option by transferring activity to the country with lower living standards. In case of offshore development carried out in India compared with the UK company saves up to 40-60 per cent of its assets. Many companies, including international corporations go this way to reduce costs while not to reduce quality. Moreover, some of these companies completely transfer their IT departments and IT processes offshore.
The main merits of transferring activities to an IT services company are that it already has the expertise and extended experience, vast pool of professionals and development infrastructure to launch the project in no time and carry it out. Time to start and ready-to-use infrastructure are sometimes of vital importance when time to market is crucial.
Engaging third parties to write your code is not an innovation. What is new is that it has never been so affordable and cost effective, so risks-free and so convenient as it is now.
Cost effective – as professionals’ salaries are significantly lower compared to Europe or the US. Safe – since the whole development process is managed by an IT service company. Convenient – the same UK firm that runs your legacy systems and installed your workflow can manage the whole process.
The most popular countries for offshore development are India and the Philippines.
From these locations, software development companies propose applications engineering, reengineering and support to IT user organizations and product developers.
Companies like Texas Instruments, Siemens, Motorola, AT&T and Philips took decision to locate their software development centers in India due to established IT and communications infrastructure, a vast pool of technical professionals with fluent English, and favourable government policy.
India is breaking stereotypes as its technological backwater is changing. In fact, currently India is the home for more than 350 software companies, including multinationals and local companies which render services both the domestic software market and the export market.
Under its Computer Software Policy of 1986, the Indian Government began an ambitious program of investment and reform to make India more attractive offshore development option. The reforms held provided technical training and the creation of distinct export zones with high speed data communications and radically cut red tape. All this resulted in that currently software industry in India approaches $1bn and is created the second largest English speaking scientific and technical India Silicon valley – the largest being in the US.
Most IT services suppliers located within India are in Bombay, where many software development companies are headquartered, and Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley. India possesses an extremely rich technical resource base and almost all kinds of bespoke software development can be developed there.
This scope of software includes database applications, object-oriented development, traditional 3GL projects, client/server systems and technical software.
The communication links installed in the export zones allow to smooth out the edges of geographical remoteness and time difference – real time and on-line communication are available 24/7. High speed data transfer channels enable customers to monitor progress on their project on a minute-by-minute basis, hold quality checks and communicate with development team as if they are next door.
Indian companies can provide the same level of quality as UK software development organizations. Plenty of Indian companies have ISO9001 certificates as well as several European and International industrial certificates.
However, offshore development is not a universal solution for all software development projects. To gain all the benefits of offshore development the project must be large enough.
The larger the project the more fiscal benefits you get and more proves itself the assembly line approach adopted by most offshore software centers (benefits become significant in projects with above 2,000 hours).
The total length of the project is another important factor: if your project for offshore development doesn’t exceed two or three moths required for set-up and familiarization it makes no sense to start it, unless these are continuations of earlier projects.
Moreover, projects requiring shipping of prototypes or extremely expensive equipment around the world are unsuitable. Risks of damaging the expensive equipment add sense to in-house development.
Even if the cost benefits overweight all reasonable arguments, it may turn out that the whole idea is one big logistical nightmare.
This is why it is important and makes sense to receive consultation from company with local UK knowledge working alongside the offshore development center. With its extended knowledge of the UK market and the requirements of UK companies, the local operation can first assess requirements, functional design and software specification, and then transfer the project to offshore operation. Completion of the project – internal acceptance, auditing of quality, acceptance testing, installation and end user training can be performed by local company.
Offshore development can’t be a universal solution for everybody but now it opens new opportunities which until recently were unfordable. Offshore development areas will keep on growing and springing up till they provide acceptable cost efficient alternatives for in-house development and add to world pool of offshore expertise and knowledge.