Outsourcing is the practice of hiring an external organization to perform specific portions of a total project. At DevDesk we have grown a network of trusted outsourcing partners, both locally and intemationally, who fulfill various portions of our website, ecommerce and custom application development services. While we fulfill many of the duties in-house, we do employ the services of specialist contractors who complement our own skills as required.
Our role as outsourcing managers is to bring together these disciplines in a practical manner based on a broad set of leamed trades and skills. As business process specialists we are able to develop the road map which guides our teams (both internal and external) to reach the desired result of our clients. As project managers we are involved every step of the way to see our projects through to a timely completion: living up to standards worthy of being backed by our own brand.
Background
As many companies do, we first started outsourcing to offshore companies in order to reduce costs while building our own Software-as-a-Service platform DevDesk Tabz. This process came not without its challenges and our experiences mirrored those of others who have attempted to build their own offshore development strategy. There were challenges of cultural differences, time zones, language barriers, skill sets and business processes all of which had to be overcome. In the end, we have developed relationships with contractors both locally and nationally which complement one another's strengths and weaknesses.
Over several years of managing outsourced teams we have been refining and improving our own outsourcing procedures in order to streamline the development process which now allows us to provide our clients with a safer, more comfortable and less expensive development experience. Our expertise in managing outsourced teams has grown from our own encounters while developing a complex multi-tenant, cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) infrastructure and we are now able to pass the benefits from lessons learned to our clients through our managed outsourcing services.
Benefits
There are a variety of benefits associated with outsourcing, the rewards of which we are able to pass along to our own clients:
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- Technical Resources - Given our relationship with a variety of partners, we are able to provide a wide range of technical expertise ranging from cloud services to mobile apps to desktop application development to related integrations.
- Flexibility - With the levels of human resources available to tackle problems, we are able to provide services from smaller web development projects to larger ecommerce deployments to full-service application development.
- Cost Efficiencies - Given our mixture of local and offshore resources, we are able to offer competitive rates while still providing a high quality of life for our local and international team members.
- Focus - We are able to focus on the core activities that we excel in: understanding your business processes, developing a plan to improve efficiencies and managing the implementation of that plan.
Offshore Development
We aim to offer a quality service at fair market rates and have adopted an outsourcing strategy which allows us to offer competitive prices while maintaining a high standard of technical expertise. We have chosen to partner with only a handful of outsourced teams from which we have grown trusted relationships giving us access to over 750 technically skilled human resources across a variety of coding platforms.
The offices we work with range from small India-based development firms of 35 people, to medium-sized international businesses of 150-500 resources each. Most of the firms we choose to work with are based in India in technical hubs such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chandigarh and Pune (primarily all Tier 1 global cities as recognized by Gartner for best areas to develop an offshore research and development office) but often they have subsidiary offices in US, UK and other parts of the world from which US or European contracts (such as "non-disclosures') have been signed for greater protections. Therefore depending on your requirements we can provide services to fit a variety of budgets and legal requirements.
Responsibility
The actual project contracts are produced and signed by DevDesk LLC for the US or DevDesk Ltd in the UK depending on your needs. As the facilitator we are responsible for overseeing the project planning, project management, requests for proposals (RFPs), development cost negotiations, security controls, strategizing of intellectual property (IP) protection, and taking on those roles which require direct contact with our business-to-business (B2B) clients including sales, customer service and support.
We therefore act as a liaison with our independent contractor network and counterparts from around the globe. This arrangement allows us the flexibility and adaptability to build independent teams based on the necessary skills required to complete a wide range of projects from basic website eCommerce and CMS systems to very complex integrations between disparate legacy systems and new online or mobile applications.
Opportunities
For companies looking to align themselves with DevDesk, we are continuing to expand our network with a small number of outside contractors. We are currently considering partnership opportunities with seasoned or experienced NoSQL environments, Hadoop, AWS, SOLR and other emerging technologies.
Visit our Partnership Opportunities page for more information