Offshore development tends to receive a lot of publicity for companies’ negative experiences. Although a lot of the negative press can be justified, there are also a lot of satisfied customers who have had very positive experiences and achieved significant cost savings.

Whilst Apps does not totally agree with the merits of the original offshore business model, we have adapted that model to our own needs and utilise a South African partnership to achieve similar cost savings to the Indian model whilst avoiding most of the culture and time difference issues and, most importantly, keeping in line with recent changes in the law.

Whereas the main reason for utilising an Indian offshore solution is because of the potentially huge cost savings that can be made whilst having technical development work carried out, the actual costs savings acheived can be negligible or indeed actually work out to be more expensive that having the equvalent work carried out locally.

The main reason for this is because of the time difference between Europe and India which effectively means what whilst one party is working the other is not. The means that communication can be an issue with matters which would ordinarily take one day to resolve, can evolve into three or four simply because the inevitable questions and clarification which is needed when carrying out work of this type, cannot be answered until usually the following day when the client returns to their office, resulting in the loss of a whole days development time.

This when combined with the obvious culture differences present between Europe and Asia, means that projects tend to overrun and quality control can be difficult to enforce and becomes yet another cost consideration.

 

Despite these potential drawbacks, there are a lot of positive aspects of outsourcing technical development work offshore, and so we have strived to achieve an alternative solution for out clients. We feel that we have achieved a balance between reducing the costs of our client's projects and ensuring the quality of the work being carried out by our partnership in South Africa. South African culture meets a much closure match to the rest of Europe than India can ever hope to achieve with a lot of South Africans having British and EU ties which enables then to travel and work throughout Europe without the need to incure the cost and delays of work permits. With the time difference between the United Kingdom and South Africa typically being one hour, issues can be dealt with quickly and efficiently as and when they arise with little or no delay to the project. These factors amongst others have led us to believe that South African offshore development is a viable alternative to an Indian solution whilst remaining competitive with Indian rates.