OPD - Outsource Product Development

Tapping the global talent pool has become a pre-requisite for survival in today's competitive world. The economic and intellectual benefits of this strategy are so overwhelming that it is often referred to as the first and next generation of "global resourcing."

Outsourcing "non-core" activities to gain such economic and intellectual advantage has become an essential component of any successful business strategy. However, as an industry matures, what constitutes its "core activity" undergoes change. The global competitive market is gradually changing the core expertise of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) from product development to product management. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have begun to realize the advantages in engaging global talent to augment development capabilities, right from high-end architecture designing to development and version support – all at a lower cost and within a short span of time.

Overall, the 4 corner stones of product engineering are:-

Quality – Product performance, breadth and depth of the functionality is all what the customer is concerned about. Other differentiators are competition driven

Speed – Competition is always closer than anticipated. Your time-to market needs to place you miles ahead of your nearest competitor!

Cost – While you need to retain your high quality product standards, you need them developed at the lowest cost possible

Innovation – The sole differentiation in the market is your innovation

Why Outsource Product Development?

With the software market becoming more competitive and mature, product companies are under immense pressure to periodically release new versions of existing products. In a global competitive market, ISV's efforts to achieve better time- to-market is challenged by

v  Shorter product life cycles

v  Technological obsolescence

v  Rapid advances in design and engineering technologies

v  Increasing design and engineering complexity

v  Limited reduction of product costs

v  Slowed recognition and resolution of product defects

Necessary infrastructure changes required with new technology to product development. Moreover, product development is an intensive activity that requires a lot of attention. If the management's attention is spent on the routine aspects of product development, then market analysis and marketing activities that directly impact the success of the company will not get top priority. In the long run, this will have a direct impact on the profitability of the company. If a product company is able to crash its product roadmap and release new versions earlier than planned, it could gain significantly in terms of market share and revenues. However, budgets for product development are fixed and resources are finite. So, the only way ISVs can crash their product roadmap and generate quick and improved versions of their products is to outsource product development activities to an OPD provider.

By outsourcing product development, companies are able to

v  Acquire expertise

v  Build additional resources

v  Make faster and more frequent releases

v  Minimize development costs, and above all

v  Boost up their bottom line by focusing on new competencies

Regards,

Ankit Bhatia