Application development outsourcing due to grow in strength, says 3fifteen head

With the past two years` economic downturn taking its toll on businesses the world over, and IT budgets coming under pressure as a result of this, one would expect development projects to be put on hold and a slowdown in the progress of business solutions to ensue.

But, flying in the face of this adversity, Roger Trummer, Sales Director at local Microsoft development powerhouse 3fifteen, says his company has experienced the exact opposite.

"In fact," Trummer says, "we`ve seen a healthy uptake in our services over the past 18 months and extremely encouraging growth from our application development outsourcing operation, to the point where it has become responsible for a significant amount of our revenue.

"Instead of putting a hold on spending in the application development outsourcing space, the exact opposite seems true," Trummer explains.

"We have found that the moment customers begin realising value from a solution they`ve built using our development resources, they continue investing in it, seeking increased value and continued return on investment from their custom-built solutions," he says.

Trummer says there are two schools of thought when it comes to acquiring software development skills.

"One school of thought says companies should in-source their development skills, the theory being that this allows them to cut down on the costs of continually evolving their business solutions, and another that advocates the use of an outsourced partner, such as 3fifteen.

"The problem with the former approach is, however, that employing a permanent in-house development team comes with increased risk, increased human resource overhead and often doesn`t afford them the wide variety of skills they actually need in order to evolve their solutions to the point where it continues to deliver increased value. And with the economic environment biting into employees` ability to make ends meet, they are easily wooed away to greener pastures, leaving a gap in the customers` development workforce, one that takes a very long time to fill.

"And in the interim, the customer is left with the challenge of finding the right replacement for the job, while their project invariably stalls."

Aside from this, companies struggle endlessly with the fact that developers tend to be specialists in one or another discipline or product line.

"That means you need a different set of skills for evolving the various line of business, business intelligence and customer relationship management solutions they are likely to have in place. And even though multi-faceted, multi-skilled developers do exist, they either come at a price premium or don`t have the deep experience that would afford them a strong competitive advantage over their peers.

"Outsourcing, by contrast, gives the customer access to a set number of development resources. And since the expertise of these development resources can be interchanged by simply swapping the `heads` out, customers can choose to have access to business intelligence skills while adding features to their business intelligence, and a month later once this project has concluded, interchange those skills for customer relationship management expertise - without impacting their overheads.

"Bundle on top of this the fact that by definition, an outsourcer is focused on leveraging contracts it has with a number of clients to ensure its developers are fresh, interested and cost-effective, it`s clear why application development outsourcing is the preferred route today."

Trummer says this trend is also likely to continue gaining strength over the coming years.

"The economies of scale we have means we can do an awesome job of staff retention, keep developers interested in projects and offer customer skills from a variety of environments and backgrounds, as and when they need them. It`s a compelling model and one I don`t see being eclipsed anytime in the near future. It truly is a great time to be a customer, application development outsourcer and developer," he concludes.