Friday, February 12, 2010

India, Still Cheapest Outsourcing Destination - Everest Group

"According to Everest Group, an outsourcing consultant group, India is expected to forge ahead in the offshoring landscape among top outsourcing countries. This is despite some stiff competition making waves in Brazil, China and the Philippines.

What would be the advantage that is unique to India, one might ask, apart from having six billion or more of the world’s population, unbridled poverty and a rising middle class? And the answer is: India scores high on the IT outsourcing checklist in three important categories – the massive talent pool (India is commonly dubbed the ‘world’s largest democracy’), very low cost structures, and most importantly a higher degree of cultural alignment to Western markets than outsourcing in China, for example.

In that regard, it is fair to say that the world buys Chinese goods because it’s cheap, but buys Indian services because they’re ‘West-aligned.’

Everest Group’s Managing Principal for Research, Eric Simonson told The Hindu’s Business Line, “We are in the process of wrapping up a survey we did, for which we have preliminary results from 400 responses. We asked people about their perception of different countries. On a scale of 1-5, India is the only country that scores five…If you look at other offshore locations, the volume is more ‘complimentary'. India is the hub, will be the hub.

Everest also noted that other countries are well poised and are aggressively pursuing the offshore market with some degree of success. However, when companies consider adding units, they tend to add units in India.

Research from the group suggest that of 116 new offshore delivery sites set up in 2009, a whopping 35 centers were cornered by India. Apparently, this was the largest number of new offshore delivery sites in any geography in 2009 with the Philippines trailing with 15 delivery centers – just 13% of the total offshore market.

The recent debate about India losing dominance as an offshoring site and the prominence of new outsourcing hotspots, i.e. Brazil, China, Pilippines, Poland and Vietnam has been offset by the results from the Everest Group.

Perhaps one of the biggest attributes of India is that it is one of the most inexpensive destinations for offshore operations in comparison with the aforementioned countries. For instance, BPO operations is about 85 percent cheaper in India in comparison with Tier 1 locations like Atlanta in the U.S. Similarly, operating cost in Brazil is about 50% less when compared to the U.S." Jacob Cherian

However, Everest Group is not focusing on Total Cost of Engagement (TCE), just the hourly rates.

The Total Cost of Engagement (TCE) evaluates the total expenditures of outsourcing projects. In addition to the hourly rates of engineering talent you must consider the cost of additional management overhead, travel costs, the painful cost of staff turnover, and a certain amount of productivity loss due to the distance and degraded communications. Most of these costs are directly related to the separation in time between teams.

In the end, outsourcing to India could be more expensive because of the TCE.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

#2 Ignoring Timezone Differences - 10 Ways to Fail at Outsourcing

In what is perhaps THE MOST CRUCIAL and FAILURE CAUSING item on this list, many forget that software development is HARD WORK and requires real-time collaboration much of the time. Regardless of the improvements in VOIP, development platforms, and people's willingness to start early and work late, the rip in communications caused by time zone differences is practically immeasurable. Just look at how many hours India and the US are separated.


The working hour overlap is NILL between San Francisco and Bangalore for example. Click on the image to plan your meetings with another time zone.

With the old Waterfall project management styles you would find that a team in the US would need to write out every minute detail of what the application should do and how it should function and deal with every contingency in advance so documents could be turned over to the development team to work on and whalah, overnight you will have working software. Didn't happen that way.

Some Indian companies are adopting Agile project management. Yahoo! This will improve the expectations factor but still communicating will be quite difficult.

What ultimately will need to happen is 1) the Indian team will need to work odd hours to communicate with the US team and 2) visit the US periodically to close communication gaps, while the 3) US team will need to visit the Indian team 3-4 times a year to deal with attrition, team morale issues, and productivity problems. Each time someone visits another 2-4 days are lost in travel time and jet lag, not to mention families destroyed because of all the travel. And each trip will cost a minimum of $2000 for airfare and hotel, etc.

In all outsourcing cases each team should visit the other but with greater physical distance, comes greater communication gaps and higher expenses. Ultimately this leads to a higher Total Cost of Engagement, which is NOT reflected in the rate per hour. Those who makes their decisions primarily based on the hourly rate deserve to lose sleep.

All of this points to doing business with nearshore providers to take advantage of the cultural similarities and cost savings. Did we mention that Mexico is a great location for application development outsourcing?

Back to: 10 Ways to Fail at Outsourcing

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México: Competing with India

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