CIO Watercooler Webinar: How to integrate offshore development teams to scale your business
A slow roll-out of new products and services can negatively affect a company’s bottom line, but keeping up with consumer demands is challenging. It requires constant innovation. This, however, can only be achieved with the right engineers. That’s why tech talent shortages are among businesses’ most serious concerns today.
Many companies believe there are too many hurdles to overcome before setting up a local tech team. Others are willing to take the risk to drive business growth but are not always delighted with the results. Western nations regularly find that their talent pools need to be bigger and that the engineers they do find lack key skills. This is when companies start exploring how to integrate offshore development teams into their business.
Creating an offshore development centre (ODC) became a popular alternative to expand a company’s teams in primary locations, given limited resources and skyrocketing prices of office and developer salaries. Some corporate leaders hesitate before offshoring as they share concerns that offshore developers won’t be integrated into their business. Some, unfortunately, had this experience with offshore development service providers. A disconnect between in-house teams and those located offshore can make it difficult to deliver successful projects, manage progress, and work in a modern iterative way integrated with the business.
Key takeaways: Integrate offshore development teams into a business
We had the pleasure of discussing this topic with other tech leaders during a recent webinar hosted by CIO WaterCooler.
CIO Watercooler is a global community of CIOs, CTOs, and COOs. They publish content and regularly organise events and sessions around topics relevant to tech leaders. Members are encouraged to share their news, views, and challenges as they lead their organisations’ technology and digital transformations.
If you missed this webinar, we’re sharing some of the key takeaways in this article.
The main goal of this Digital Boardroom was to discuss how tech leaders can:
- build integrated offshore and onshore teams and establish effective communication
- integrate external resources into Agile or DevOps ways of working
- accelerate transformation and scale growth with offshore development
Keynote speakers:
- Emilien Coquard, The Scalers co-founder and CEO, shared his deep industry insights into developing world-class integrated engineering teams.
- Antoine Laurent, the CTO of Ykone, shared a success story of working with his offshore development team established by The Scalers, who has been an integral part of the business since 2014. You can view the case study here.
- Milan Juza, CIO for e-commerce at TUI, shared how to achieve high performance with near and offshore teams.
- Alasdair Thompson, Head of Operations of Defence & Space at BAE Systems Digital Intelligence, was the Event Chair.
We will focus on the main points from Emilien’s presentation.
India — the Silicon Valley of Asia
Emilien explained why India became one of the top tech destinations and, simultaneously, a home for The Scalers. With 2.14M STEM graduates annually, India has the lowest demand-supply gap among top tech locations worldwide and is set to overtake the US by 2024. This surplus of tech profiles makes for less tension in the IT job market than in Western countries.
As for Bangalore — Asia’s Silicon Valley, the facts speak for themselves. Analysts estimate that Bangalore will become the world’s largest tech hub by 2024, currently second only to the US. Today, Bangalore is the first place in India where global companies set up development centres and has more than 40 unicorn startups.
Over $150B in software is exported from India annually, nearly 60% for US companies and 30% for Europe and the UK. The Indian tech industry focuses primarily on exporting software rather than building products for local use.
Most Indian software engineers have worked for global companies, so they know Western expectations regarding deliverables and communication. And because English is the primary language of the industry, collaboration is much easier.
Read the full article at: https://thescalers.com/how-to-integrate-offshore-development-teams-to-scale-your-business/
