Offshore Development Team — Startups Got Some Success Stories to Tell
According to a 2011 industry survey, over 90% of Fortune’s top 500 enterprises put IT outstaffing with offshore development team into action. So, it has been clear for a quite long time that handling at least one primary business operation in “offshore-like” manner could definitely save some resources. And the present-day situation seems no different at all, particularly considering global shortage of skilled talents. Not to mention worldwide distribution of worthy developers — it has never been smooth and balanced, let’s face it. That’s why myriads of international projects have got countless success stories to tell — from facilitated startup growth to well-optimized operational costs, and additional internal resources acquired owing to offshore development team. But when it comes to high-quality IT outstaffing services, there is no silver bullet. Of course, we all know such endeavor may often involve potential risks. And here are some genuinely successful business cases for every undertaker to learn from.
Great Businesses Forged Remotely. Offshore Development Team That Worked Like Magic
The thing is that far not every successful company having some tasks committed to third-party service providers would readily reconfirm this pretty normal thing. But the following businesses betting heavily on IT outstaffing can speak openly about all related experience. After all, these unique projects got nothing to hide — as offshore development team merely forged excellent progress of each. Here they are.
WhatsApp: Turning to Eastern Europe to Keep Operation Costs Down
The story of WhatsApp begins as far as 2012 when the whole undertaking had just 30 in-house employees pulled together in a tiny office near Mountain View. Assisted with only five part-time workers, this ambitious startup managed to climb on the top of popularity with its notorious chat application, even despite fairly modest seed capital of about $250,000. WhatsApp managed to build and launch a successful product by effectively sourcing the required tech talent in Eastern Europe. While their in-house workforce had been mainly engaged in customer support and operations, the whole bulk of development is still handled remotely, with only some contractors currently relocated to the United States.
Qualcomm: Cooperating With Remote Embedded Software & Hardware Design Provider
Headquartered in the United States (San Diego, CA), this multinational telecom and semiconductor equipment provider fruitfully cooperated with offshore development team by GlobalLogic. The latter is known as IT outstaffing company, which successfully brought to life the idea to create a smart digital pen that would drive data capturing and recording performance to the new level. With over 16 years of experience in remote software and hardware design development, GlobalLogic experts got their dedicated teams located through 4 countries worldwide — namely Ukraine, Poland, India and Israel. Their most recent project regarding digital pen creation proved to be a real sensation, representing the next stylus generation for tablet-like devices. The solution uses ultra-modern technology that goes far beyond the screen — working across external surfaces as well.
TransferWise: Betting on Dispersed Offshore Development Team
Our next success story is told by a global money transfer service known as TransferWise. Although company’s authorities declared that they’d got nothing with offshoring, outsourcing or consulting, an integral part of their core engineering team is built up with a number of independent workers. Using such would-be “dispersed” way of software development, TransferWise has the major workforce assets located in Estonia and Ukraine. Being particularly active in the latter, skilled engineers from Lviv-city have successfully become a backbone foundation of the whole offshore development team. Working in tight cooperation with their Estonia-based colleagues, the company often highlights the incredible value of local workers said to be “always quick and determined.”
Klout: Moving to Singapore to Build New Product
This startup project was delivered as original influencer ranking platform that has got a massive winning advantage with remote development. So, Klout has been initially brought to life in Singapore. And it took local bespoke development team something around 4–5 months to create a live beta version of the product as we know it today. But the final outcome proved to be surprisingly impressive — seed fundings of about $200,000 grew to a colossal $40 million investment just in 4 years. Right now the whole project belongs to Lithium Technologies, as it had been sold for $200 million in 2014.
Citigroup: Running Multiple Remote Locations to Cut 11,000 Jobs
Among the other American companies which have recently moved their tech tasks out of the staff, the rest of names include Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Barclays, etc. But Citi as one of the leading US international financial corps is known to have been outsourcing the lion’s share of tech operations since as far as 1992. Recently, the company has reportedly cut nearly 11,000 jobs. While about 25% of these employees were IT-related workers, almost all software development operations at Citigroup are now handled throughout multiple locations — across the Philippines, India, and Poland. Moreover, US financial giant is also running so-called offshore development team “centers of excellence” to benefit ongoing remote relations with several major local outsourcing foundations like TATA Consultancy Services or Wipro.
StudyTube: Hiring Ukraine-Based Software Engineers
The last player also relies on nearshore programmers, as this Netherlands-based online education platform is betting heavily on Ukrainian remote talents. Although StudyTube had been initially dealing with part-time freelancers for engineering, soon the head executives were pushed towards realizing that such approach would be hardly capable of delivering a solid product. On those grounds, the project focus on hiring Ukrainian software engineers — and that spared no effort to achieve the expected results. According to the company’s officials, their Kharkiv-based offshore development team made up of only reliable people can efficiently produce high-quality code on time. Here we see most of the well-established internal processes driven with remote IT outstaffing model — which brought the overall investment totaling over $1,7 million and firsthand experience working with Ukrainian programmers for maximum speedy facilitated startup growth. That’s it!
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