Offshore Product Development - Introduction

This is the first of a series of blogs by Texnovate Solutions on the Offshore Product Development(OPD) market.

Introduction
In this blog, we will briefly touch upon what OPD is and how can product development companies benefit from it. Offshore Product Development refers to the services offerings specifically targeted at Software Product vendors by companies based in locations with easy availability of highly skilled resources at affordable cost. OPD service providers can be providing services targeted at the entire end-to-end product development cycle or a specific part of the cycle. This can include working on a part of the product, market research, new features, testing for developed code, documentation, providing technical and user support for products or even taking complete ownership for product lines.

Who is OPD service targeted at?
Offshore product development services are targeted at software product vendors of any size. This can be the largest vendors, who use their captive and a multitude of service providers to derive value, to a product company with a handful of employees. Small and Medium sized product vendors (or divisions of large companies) who are looking at growing to the next level can benefit from the freedom OPD offers in focusing on developing and marketing their product lines.

Benefits
How does this benefit Software Product Vendors?

A. Core Competence:Among other benefits, this brings us to the question of core competence. As in any outsourcing, the benefits are proportional to how much internal analysis and strategic evaluation has gone into the outsourcing exercise. And such analysis should lead to the answer to the question - where is the our time, as a company, best spent? If the answer to this question is marketing, product management, product idea or programming, it still leaves out a lot of activities as non-core and potential candidates for outsourcing. The outsourcing of non-core activities brings more focus and helps get more time for activities which bring more value to the organisation.
B. Access to Specialist Resources: For many product vendors, it is difficult to get some specialist resources at the right time. In some instances, the resource requirements may be very cyclical leading to not justifying hiring them. Such cases deserve a look at outsourcing the resources to a specialist vendor who has a pool of resources available for such needs. This situation can also apply to resources for lower skilled jobs (compared to programming) like testing, documentation etc.
C. Support and Migration: Support for existing product lines and migration of products to new platforms or multiple platforms are also activities which can take up a lot of time and in some cases not be justifiable by a business case. This could be the case because there are not many customers requiring it. It is nevertheless an activity that cannot be ignored because of the effect it can have on the vendors reputation. Again, this is an activity that can be done very effectively by specialist vendor.
D. Best Practices: Since OPD vendors undertake all of their different offerings for a number of vendors, the product companies can benefit from a lot of best practices, newer techniques and quality processes.


In the next blog, we will discuss what to look for when scouting for an OPD supplier.

About Texnovate
Texnovate is a young and dynamic company established with the aim of bringing the benefits of technical expertise, best practices, scalable team and outsourcing to product development companies. It is a group of product development and technology experts from leading IT companies who have a breadth of expertise developing products with large IT and Product companies. Based out of Pune one of the leading IT corridors of India, providing easy access of software talent and communication facilities, Texnovate works on a business model seeking to establish local management teams closer to where its customers are – thereby ensuring its customers get the attention they deserve