Off-shore software development... Blog 1 in a short series

I recently mentioned to a colleague that I get 5 or 6 approaches every day on LinkedIn from off-shore outsourced development providers, offering development services to me. He was quite shocked by that, even though he has been personally involved in that side of the industry himself, (albeit intermittently) over a number of years.

Now, I know I’m highly visible on LinkedIn and other networking forums, but 5 or 6 contacts every day on a single subject – that is a lot. We agreed that this suggests a couple of things – that there’s very possibly an over-supply on the provider side, and that the UK is seen as a target-rich environment for these many providers.

These days, I’m not normally in the market for these services, so I usually decline – usually politely, though sometimes I think “how the dickens do they expect to do business with anyone at all with that crass approach?”. So - there's my first issue. For the most part the sales prospecting approach of these firms is hopeless, I'm afraid to say ...

Just to set a few things in place regarding my ability to objectively comment of this topic, I’m no tenderfoot when it comes to the whole notion of what we today call “off-shoring”.

I’m actually an early adopter of this approach, in that the firm I worked at in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s actually created a sizeable team of well qualified coders based in Mumbai. As the itinerant head of applications management I was their main client, an internal one. So I think I have a perspective that looks back over 40 years on this matter. I think too that the matters arising in this whole approach today haven’t really changed much in all that time!

After 4 decades in what we now call IT, (in the 70s we just called it computing), I have friends on all sides of software development – on-shore and off-shore – both customers and providers, intermediaries too.

So, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at this market from the varying viewpoints and offer some thoughts. In subsequent blogs, I’ll look into the process in more detail, from the respective viewpoints of a provider and a new customer. 

How do you see this? Are you a supplier? Or maybe you're a buyer with experiences to share? Feel free to let me have your input.