The coronavirus crisis intensified the demand for outsourcing software development. Many companies have been forced to adapt to the new business landscape and find ways to satisfy customer expectations, minimize spendings, and gain a competitive advantage.
Companies were pushed to expand their technical skills and resources to keep up with digital transformation and remote working environments. Partnering with an experienced nearshore software company is one of the most common choices because it offers remote market knowledge and experienced professionals.
Many big businesses, including Google, Porsche, and IBM, have already leveraged the advantages of nearshore development. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits such cooperation can bring to your business:
1. Aligned time zone
Nearshore offers to work with teams in nearby countries and time zone similar to your country. For instance, the ELEKS nearshore software company has 11 delivery centers in 8 countries, including the USA, Canada, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Estonia, England, and UAE.
An outsourcing software provider that operates within different working hours can lead to a significant drop in efficiency and productivity. If your app or system crashes midday, your outsourced team may be sleeping and will be able to resolve the issue at the beginning of the workday. That can cause irreversible damage to your business.
In contrast, nearshoring proposes seamless virtual real-time communication. If any problems appear external team can respond within minutes and resolve an issue. Face-to-face meetings are also easy to organize. Moreover, your employees or external team will not have to suffer jet lag because there won’t be any long-distance trips, and the cost for travel expenditures will be reduced.
2. Talent availability
The nearshoring business model implies that the provider creates a team combining in-house and external specialists. Internal hiring and retaining processes can be pretty challenging. You will have to have an HR department responsible for going through many CVs and choosing the right candidate. It will require additional costs. Moreover, it may take months to find a qualified specialist. What’s worse, without the right tech expertise, a business won’t be able to turn its ideas into reality.
Nearshoring offers you access to a large talent pool of professionals who work with all kinds of technologies – from Java, PHP, and React to Python, .NET, and many other. That’s a perfect choice for a company when its internal team lacks expertise or experts at all. Outside specialists will bring necessary skills to the in-house team and share their knowledge. The internal team will exploit the potential for professional growth, and the company will achieve operational efficiency.
3. Cultural and language alignment
A unified cultural approach is the core of the successful partnership between a company and any outsourced provider. Cultural affinity is more than sharing the same holidays and personal beliefs. Having a similar culture includes:
- Having the same work ethic
- Complete team’s understanding of what is expected of them.
- Preventing possible business risks.
The same approach applies when it comes to language. Fluent professionals in English mean that the external team will seamlessly integrate into the work process. It will also be possible to effectively communicate both ways to discuss business models, plans, and strategies and avoid misunderstanding due to poor language skills.
Many nearshore providers quickly adopt a company’s culture while transferring process. Furthermore, their specialists have highly proficient English. By reducing cultural and language barriers, nearshoring provides high-level outsourcing services.
4. Intellectual property rights protection
Once your internal team created any product such as software, blueprint, or design, its intellectual property (IP) rights belong to your team. With outsourcing, it becomes more complicated. The external team co-develops a product, and your company has to take over the ownership.
Some outsourcing companies are located in countries with weak IP protection regulations that do not match your county’s law. If such a company violates the IP contract, it will be enforced under their country’s regulations. Even though international organizations standardize compliance, some countries have loopholes in their laws and use them to their benefit.
Nearshore development offers you an option with a geographically close country and has similar standards for IP protection. So if your property is unsecure, it is easier to enforce IP contracts or NDAs to protect it.
5. Cutting costs
Another advantage of nearshore outsourcing is the reduction of operational expenses without compromising on the quality of a product. Depending on the country you choose, there might be a significant decrease in charges. Your company saves on equipment, facility, specialists hiring, and retaining processes with the remote team.
Moreover, travel expenses and other hidden costs can be reduced because of the close location of the outsourcing provider. Nearshoring provides a perfect cost/effectiveness balance.
How to get the most out of such a partnership and its benefits?
As described above, partnering with an outsourcing company can bring many benefits. Consider the following factors to get the most out of those advantages:
1. Choose tasks to outsource
Think about what assignment takes the most time and causes slowdowns in your company. Clutch, a ratings and reviews company, indicates that companies most frequently outsourced accounting (37%), IT services (37%), and digital marketing (34%) tasks.
Prioritising such tasks and outsourcing them can lead to freeing up the time of your in-house team. Your internal professionals can focus on more meaningful and high-value business operations that can lead to further growth.
2. Provide transparency
Ensure transparency from your side as a client. Inform your partner about organizational structure and capabilities, internal processes. Outsourcing companies need to select specialists that will be the best fit based on your individual approaches and requirements.
3. Give your partner an instant feedback
Since nearshoring enables real-time communication, make sure your external team feedback whenever possible. It will significantly improve the development quality and speed up the process if there are some issues that the outsourcing team needs to align with you before handling.
Key takeaways
Many companies throughout the world are turning to nearshoring because of the advantages it provides. Apart from ease of communication, cultural and geographical proximity, nearshore companies offer the best solutions to satisfy the needs of their customers and maintain the high quality of an outcome.
Rhydian Choi 
Nicola Holder