Just finished the panel discussion at SD West on Offshoring and  we had about forty people attending. I was joined on the panel by Jim Tooley from Ariba, Julie Iskow from WageWorks, moderated by Ross Wheeler from Paravirtual.

My fellow panelists have experience outsourcing to India, China, Canada & Romania.
One is now looking for a partner in Latin America to enable real collaboration during normal U.S. work hours. And in the audience were two professional software developers from Mexico & one from Brazil showing the attraction of professional events like SD West extends to these nearshore locations.

We had several questions about how to find vendors and websites that rate them. There is no website I know of that does a good job of rating offshore vendors in general. Outsourcing is a relationship business and most deals come from personal referrals and contacts. Of course I mentioned that the Accelerance Global Partner Network is also a good place to find a great offshore partner.

Someone asked about outsourcing development of embedded software for custom hardware.  This was not recommended but outsourcing embedded software development for various processor families and real-time operating systems is popular.

We also discussed using an offshore partner versus setting up your own operation. You will face a challenge recruiting for your own small operation in India because Indian engineers are more interested in working for large companies. Ariba is a relatively large company and they are able to recruit and keep engineers. Attrition at the Ariba operation in India is well below the industry average of around 20%. That means that 2 programmers on a team of 10 at most offshore operations in India will be gone by the end of the year.

We agreed that use of offshoring to simply augment your software development team with additional engineers does not work well. It is better to hire an offshore team and give them full responsibility & autonomy for projects and modules.

Finally, we had fun raffling off a signed copy of my book Software without Borders. But everyone was a winner because I am sending a free eBook to all that entered the raffle – even my fellow panelists requested and will receive a copy.

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