Accelerate Software Success with Offshore Software Development

Is your software development being hampered by talent shortages, excessive costs or slow delivery times? Offshore development provides access to specialized skills, lower expenses and accelerated delivery that can overcome these common challenges.

As per Gartner, over 80% of companies now use some form of offshore development, with India and Eastern Europe being the most popular destinations. The benefits go well beyond labour cost savings into areas like quality, innovation and time-to-market.

In this article, we will examine the five most compelling benefits of offshore software development and how it powers software success in today’s competitive business landscape.

4 Top Benefits of Offshore Software Development Teams

1. Cost Savings

One of the biggest benefits of offshore software development is the potential for significant cost reduction. By leveraging talent and infrastructure from lower-cost locations, businesses can realize major savings in two key areas:

Lower Labor Costs:

The cost of software developers’ salaries, benefits, and overhead varies greatly by country and region. According to PayScale data, the average annual salary for a software developer in the U.S. is over $92,000, while in India it is under $10,000. These dramatic differences allow companies to hire talented offshore developers for a fraction of the cost compared to local talent.

Offshore teams are highly motivated to deliver quality work as outsourced projects provide excellent career opportunities and above-average local wages. So you benefit from experienced, low-cost talent leading to major bottom-line savings.

Reduced Infrastructure Expenses:

When working with an offshore development partner, they typically provide the entire technical infrastructure needed for your projects at their facilities. This includes hardware, software, office space and other overhead.

By leveraging these existing offshore facilities, you avoid large capital expenses associated with new onshore infrastructure to support development teams. Your offshore provider handles those costs within their optimized facilities.

This combination of lower labour and infrastructure costs allows you to stretch your software budget much further compared to onshore-only development. The cost efficiencies open the door for you to develop more applications, enhance existing ones faster, and invest savings into other parts of the business.

2. Access to Specialized Talent

Popular offshore destinations offer an abundance of qualified and specialized technology talent that may be scarce or non-existent in your local market. Tapping into these global talent pools provides key advantages:

Large Talent Pool:

Regions like India and Eastern Europe are producing hundreds of thousands of IT graduates each year. These specialized offshore talent pools allow you to scale teams up or down as needed for projects. This level of abundant talent is hard to match locally.

You also gain access to developers with niche skill sets that may not exist among local resources. Having a deep bench of qualified candidates ensures you can assemble teams with the exact mix of technical skills your projects require.

Niche Expertise:

Offshore providers focused on key technologies often develop deep expertise difficult to find in generalist local talent. For example, an offshore firm specializing in cloud migrations will have specialized skills in containers, microservices, and other emerging cloud-native architectures.

Tapping into these niche offshore capabilities allows you to augment your team with technical experts in the latest technologies not readily available in your region. This specialized expertise helps ensure your projects utilize the most advanced and innovative techniques from day one.

The breadth and depth of global talent produce higher-quality outcomes and give you an edge in leveraging cutting-edge technologies before competitors. Offshore talent fills resource gaps and provides specialized skills difficult or expensive to find locally.

3. Faster Delivery Times

Collaborating with offshore teams can accelerate development cycles and shorten time-to-market for software projects through enhanced coordination and flexible scaling.

Time Zone Advantages:

Offshore teams often work in time zones many hours ahead of onshore stakeholders. For example, India is 9-12 hours ahead of U.S. time zones.

This significant overlap allows for nearly round-the-clock development. Specs, designs and updates developed onshore during the day can be worked on offshore overnight and vice versa. Issues or blockers can also be resolved without costly delays due to time differences.

Effective collaboration across time zones compresses development cycles by enabling continuous progress. Features and fixes ship faster for users.

Scalability:

Leading offshore providers maintain large talent pools allowing them to scale developer teams up and down as needed to meet delivery timelines. Ramping up offshore teams in parallel with onshore groups enables much faster delivery compared to local hiring alone.

Conversely, offshore groups can scale back once projects are completed, providing flexibility and savings versus carrying a full-time local headcount between major releases. This on-demand scaling accelerates time-to-market for both initial and ongoing application development.

By leveraging time zone advantages and flexible scaling, offshore teams help compress release cycles to support continuous deployment and iteration. Tight collaboration minimizes delays so you ship faster.

Article you might be interested in Exploring Turnaround Strategies and Their Importance

4. Enhanced Focus on Core Competencies

Outsourcing software development tasks to an offshore partner allows your onshore teams to focus on business-critical activities and core competencies.

Internal Resources Focused on Business Goals:

Handing off design, coding and testing activities to offshore groups frees up your product managers, architects and other team members. Rather than getting bogged down in project execution, your staff can focus on strategic goals like:

• Defining new features based on customer feedback
• Improving user experience and interfaces
• Planning future product capabilities and roadmaps
• Driving adoption and managing stakeholder communications

With offshore partners managing the day-to-day build work, your experts can focus on high-value tasks that align software to business objectives and user needs.

Offshore Partner Manages Execution:

Meanwhile, your offshore provider handles the core software delivery activities like:

• Translating requirements into technical specs
• Building new features and integrations
• Testing functionality prior to release
• Fixing bugs and resolving issues
• Integrating new code into shared repositories
• Deploying updates and monitoring performance

Their specialized staff and processes manage the development process end-to-end allowing your team to engage at a higher, strategic level.

Outsourcing execution offshore reinforces your team’s strengths while benefiting from world-class delivery capabilities.

Conclusion

The advantages of combining onshore product experts with specialized offshore development teams are compelling. Companies realize 60-70% cost reductions, ship features 50% faster, and free up resources to focus on core competencies.

Offshore development is no longer just about cost savings – it enables software excellence across critical dimensions like skills, speed and business alignment.

As your company aims to become a digital leader in your industry, evaluate how offshore talent can help you achieve key development goals around quality, release velocity and innovation. The outcomes may accelerate your software and business performance beyond expectations.

Let me know if you would like me to modify or expand the intro and conclusion sections in any way. I’m happy to refine them further.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)