Overview

With market focus shifting from domestic to global, while businesses have a great opportunity to grow in the international markets they also must look at global resources to reduce cost, improve productivity and reduce cycle time. During the last two decades manufacturing facilities moved to low-cost countries, and now IT development and IT enabled services are moving those countries that offer best value.

"The number of firms using offshore providers will grow by 50% during the next two years, while offshore budgets will more than double. By 2003, two-thirds of our interviewees intend to use offshore providers - not just for upgrades and maintenance but also for strategic IT activities like application architecture and design" - Forrester Report 2001.

India is considered as the most mature region for IT offshore work and IT enabled services, while other countries from Easter Europe and China are emerging as serious contenders.

Challenges and Opportunities

The economics of offshore development make a compelling case for offshore outsourcing. Fully loaded cost of $20 - $35/hr is very attractive. However, businesses have to be cautious about their approach. Instead of low rates, overall value of delivered services must be the criteria. Unlike manufactured products, specifications for the IT projects and service levels are hard to quanitfy and compare. Key challenges of offshore IT outsourcing are as follows:

  • Quantifying real cost comparison based on delivered output as opposed to hourly rate

  • Realizing comparable innovation and creativity in the development process

  • Management of changing business needs vs. fixed specifications

  • Erosion of internal knowledge base and expertise

In order to overcome the challenges and realize benefits of offshore outsourcing , each business must carefully develop an offshore outsourcing model that takes into account the nature of its information needs, application platform and portfolio and an optimum model for partnering with an outsourcing vendor. If implemented correctly offshore outsourcing can deliver following key benefits:

  • Lower total cost of IT development and maintenance

  • Lower cycle time from start-to-finish

  • Better ROI and therefore more projects will become viable - leading to a greater overall value

Critical Success Factors

  • Project management:

    • Given the complexity of working through time zones, cultures and multiple remote communications technologies, strong project management will be required to keep the project on track.

  • Pilot Projects:

    • Companies must test their offshore readiness and a vendor’s quality by doing an initial pilot project. These projects should not be high profile, extremely large or too dependent on other systems

  • Offshore Project Portfolio

    • Companies must understand risk tolerances, internal skills portfolio, process maturity and remote programming experience to determine where it makes the most sense to use offshore resources. Certain projects or systems are much easier to support remotely than others

  • Significant onshore presence in early stages:

    • Start slowly: Working within the confines of a remote relationship is difficult. It is even more difficult if time zone differences are great, cultures are dissimilar, a language barrier exists and people communicating remotely have never met each other. To mitigate some of the difficulties, start an offshore relationship with a larger number of the remote resources working locally.

Our Services

Our approach for offshore development includes a set of evaluation criteria to determine if a project can benefit from offshore development. Less is the need for user interaction, more defined are the technical requirements, and larger is the size of project - more suited is the project for offshore development. Average cost of our offshore development effort is about 50% less than the domestic development cost.

  • Package Implementation and Support

  • Custom Application Development

  • Application Maintenance

  • Application Re-engineering and Re-development

Methodology

We utilize a mixed delivery model for offshore development and maintenance projects. While critical activities such as application architecture, standards and templates are developed on-site, development phase is executed offshore. We believe in transparent development model where offshore project coordinators acts as a single point of total responsibility for the client. Members of the offshore team participate in onsite process and then move offshore for knowledge transfer and execution with a clear understanding of requirements and standards.



Our offshore team model mitigates attrition risk with shadow staffing. Project management and tracking is done via a project management portal for continuous monitoring and feedback.

Byzantech Advantage

  • Transparent offshore development Models

  • Focus on UI and technical architecture delivers quality, productivity and low cost

  • Robust development processes for efficient scalability of development teams

  • Web-based Dashboard for real-time monitoring of progress

  • Integration of offshore resources using virtual team models to reduce development cost

  • Quality processes to ensure client objectives are met

  • Breadth and depth of capabilities across technology and industry domains

  • Flexible engagement options
Ph: 630.652.0450
Fx: 630.652.0960         		Copyright (c) 2003 Byzan Technologies, Inc.
All product and company names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. 		1900 S. Highland Avenue, Suite 105
Lombard, IL 60148