Offshore Software Development is a provision of software development services by an external supplier positioned in a country that is geographically remote from the client enterprise; a type of offshore outsourcing. The main reason behind the companies to use offshore software development services is the higher development cost of the local service providers. The global software R&D services market as contrasted to ITO and BPO is rather young and currently is at early stages of its development, but India is leading the world in this field.

Software development, including stand-alone applications, network applications and web-based sites and business applications can now be done easily and inexpensively offshore. Here we focus on the background behind outsourcing and offshore software development, and why you may wish to consider offshore software development for your future projects.

Offshore Software Development is not new. Companies throughout North America have been using developers in Israel and India for over 20 years with excellent results and high ROI. Although you may not hear much about it - many of products developed and marketed by some leading American companies are, in reality, developed abroad, or developed by foreign workers employed locally.

True offshore software development is done either entirely or very nearly entirely offshore. Contact with clients is conducted almost entirely through electronic communications. In very rare cases short visits or exchanges of personnel take place - and if so, only for very short periods of time. The 'real' software development work is done entirely offshore over the course of weeks or months. In very rare situations, it may be necessary and/or desirable to have an offshore worker placed in your workplace for a short period. This is a very rare instance and generally only necessary if you have a product or service upon which the developer must be trained before being able to participate and be productive on your project.

Benefits of Offshore Software Development:

Virtually every client has slightly different needs and expectations about how Offshore Software Development can benefit them. Some of them have been broken down into these main categories:

• Cost reduction
• Time to market
• Experienced team members
• Skills and development
• Access to the latest, hard-to-find skills
• Flexible teams, team scalability and employment terms
  

Shawn Frankk is the author of this article. He has been writing articles on   Offshore Software Development  since last three years. He is also involved in providing the regular updates to the consumer about software product development. http://casestudies.q3tech.com