Software
development process includes- research, development, prototyping, modification,
reuse, maintenance, re-engineering and many other activities prior to roll out.
There is a huge demand for software across industries and more often than not,
most companies aren’t equipped to deal with it on their own. These tasks are then
assigned to companies who can take care of software development and some of
these are located commonly in different countries and are called offshore
software development firms. The main reason for which many software
development organisations hire offshore developing agencies is to avoid the
huge development and research costs that they have to bear for the local
service providers.
The Major Countries Involved in the Industry
As
per statistics of 2003, this booming business of offshore software development was
controlled by companies like India, Philippines, Canada and Israel and in later
2009, 50% of the combined share of world market for offshore software
development was with India and Philippines. Countries like Portugal, Poland,
Czech Republic, Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia have also invested in this arena
recently.
The Major Offshore Hubs of the word
The
Gartner report states that the cities that have invested in offshore development
companies are categorized as tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 based on multiple
factors such as quality of infrastructure, global connectivity corridor and
availability of man power capital for the purpose of better investments and
results. The report concludes by stating that cities like Bangalore, Yerevan,
Noida, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bucharest, New Delhi, Tel Aviv (Israel), Chennai,
Pune, Indore, Gurgaon, Thiruvananthapuram, Greater Toronto Area, Ottawa,
Montreal, Moscow & St. Petersburg shall be the best places to set up
Offshore software development companies and hence these are categorized under
Tier 1 group. To be noted, given the present trend of growth in this sector,
several companies have started to use offshore development
companies in China also along with India with a lower cost per developer model.
The major services
provided by offshore development companies are
software development, mobile application developments, applications
re-engineering, Software QA Testing services, maintenance and support and
project resource. Many a number of Web 2.0 platforms and websites are also
developed offshore while the management and entrepreneurs are situated at the
US, UK and Europe. Furthermore, the difference in time zone when working with
India and China for the western part of the world allows work to be done round
the clock making it a competitive advantage for the investors.