Outsourcing: A Decision of Trust

Choosing the right provider is a key to successful outsourcing. With the hundreds of software outsourcing companies, you must thoroughly filter through all of them and determine if they are offering the services you need and if their goals and overall company culture complements your own corporation’s culture.

Below are few general rules to follow when selecting an IT outsourcing companies that can help you.

Communication

The most common problems faced by companies who decide to outsource to offshore locations are those of language and cultural discrepancies. It is important to see that you communicate effectively and understand each other’s requirements, in order to minimize misunderstandings. The difference in time zones could also cause communication difficulties. Accessibility at critical junctures should also be considered as a factor while selecting your outsourcing partner. On a practical level, this would involve regular access to a clear, reliable communication link, be it e-mail, phone call or instant messaging. Ensure that your outsourcing service provider has access to good communication channels.

Technical Competence

Establish the credentials of the company through testimonials. Once that has been established, you need to know if the provider possesses enough infrastructural and technical expertise to be able to handle the requirements of your project. It is always wise to be informed about the processes and methodologies that your prospective development partner follows. Once you are aware of the process, it will be possible to get a clearer idea of how exactly your project will be handled and whether it is in sync with your quality expectations.

Keep your information safe

When working with outsourcing companies, you may have to provide information that has commercial value to your company and you may not want your competitors and general public to get a hold of that info. In such case, make sure you sign an NDA (nondisclosure agreement) with the outsourcing company.

Look for a risk free deal

When you decide to outsource a certain IT project look for the company that is ready to sign an agreement and take a full financial responsibility for the product they develop. If they fail to produce the piece of software you order, claim for a compensation of losses that may come from malfunction or failure of the software. Chances are that a company will provide such a guarantee only in case it is confident about the quality it provides.

Quality of the Contract

The contract must have the appropriate clauses and incentives to continue to make the outsourcer perform and to continue to make you perform.

Risk Mitigation

The sheer distance involved in off shoring your project lessens the amount of control you have on its development, thereby increasing the risk involved. Check your outsourcing partner’s payment options and see if they are progress-based. Also check to see if your outsourcing partner has provisions to enable periodic checks on the advancement of the project, so that you are kept aware of the progress in the development of your project.

Post Development Support

Your relationship with the service provider needs to continue even after the completion of the project. The success of a project is best judged after its implementation and it is during this stage that it requires reliable maintenance services. Your service provider should offer post development support and testing procedures to see the problem that you experience in the early stages of a project.

References:

  • Ezine articles
  • Outsourcing Services
  • Outsourcing: 20 steps to success by Warren S. Reid
  • Outsource 2 India

Contact:

Kaushal Dugar
Assistant BDM, NA & Canada
netPurists
Email: info@netpurists.com 

 

India – The Global Hub of IT Services

In today’s highly competitive economy organizations are under pressure to develop products/projects at a rapid and cost-effective rate or make upgrades to existing technologies quickly. These IT solutions need to be implemented without compromising on their quality standards or the organization’s ../Resources. The answer to such problems has often been quoted as “outsourcing”.

So what really is outsourcing? Outsourcing can be defined as the delegation of non-core operations or jobs from internal production within a business to an external entity that specializes in that operation. It is a business decision that is often made to focus on core-competencies or to lower costs. Due to the nature of programming, the outsourcing of software development services has evolved much more rapidly as compared to other domains.

The Indian IT services industry has been well recognized globally as a destination which is value for money coupled with deep domain expertise. The following are a list of reasons why outsourcing to Indian companies are so popular:

1. Cost-Effective Services

Outsourcing to India can help global organizations save as much as 30-40% of operating costs! India has a large pool of, educated, trained and technically skilled manpower and this number only keeps growing every year. The vast pool has encouraged specialization on the supply side, and enabled employers to be selective and build on quality on the demand-side, keeping the industry highly competitive.

2. Communication Skills

India has the largest population of English speaking audience after North America. Due to its colonial legacy, English became a part of the Indian primary education system, which has now become an advantage. China and Japan have challenged the world with their technological and manufacturing expertise, but have found it difficult to introduce English as the medium of grassroots education. Over half of Fortune 500 companies employ Indian Software talent as India provides a pool of over 4 million highly trained English speaking technical personnel (second only to the USA). Language barriers cease to exist when you deal with the Indian IT services industry.

3. Time Zone Advantages

The geographical position of India as a country, proves to be beneficial because of the time zone difference between Asian countries and the West. You can get your work done while your business closes down in the evening. This is especially beneficial for companies in the IT services industry that need to provide round-the-clock customer support with a flexibility and faster turn. 24x7x365 technical support becomes a reality at an affordable cost.

4. India’s stable government

India has celebrated more than 60 years of democracy and has one of the world’s most stable governments. Building up the IT services sector has been a top priority for the Indian government. India has a Ministry of Information Technology that has been quick to approve legislation and the implementation of IT policies and has streamlined regulatory processes. The Indian government has even released a bill termed as the “IT ACT 2000”. With this kind of support companies in India have been able to build high-tech IT parks which has the best in technology and infrastructure. The Indian government has even permitted 100% foreign equity.

5. Global organizations’ most preferred choice

India has been the most preferred choice among global organizations when it comes to outsourcing of IT services. In the U.S alone, more than 80+% have ranked India as their first choice, when outsourcing software and IT services. There has been global recognition of India as an outsourcing superpower for development services.

Why netPurist?

We see the world through our clients’ eyes, from their point of view. They are the people who are operating under immense pressure to complete big, messy, complex projects that will have a huge impact on their organizations. They’re the ones with the Big Problem. They are the people who hire us. We use that perspective to guide everything we do.

We combine the best of the strategist with the best of the technologist, understanding that every business opportunity has technology implications, and every technology initiative should be driven by strategy.

We collaborate. Why? Because in today’s world nobody has all the answers, problems are too big, too global, and too complex. Either you bring together the expertise you need, from multiple sources, or you lose. Bottom line: We recruit and hire people who think collaboratively.

Quality at netPurists is not an oral guarantee given over a handshake, but a well defined set of criteria applied to the entire development process. At netPurist, we guarantee the utmost level of quality in our operations by rigorously applying the following methodologies.

  • 20-30% low Total Cost of Ownership.
  • 30-40% higher productivity.
  • Holding periodic Quality Training programs to enhance the performance of all employees.
  • Inspecting the quality of the applications at all levels of development.
  • Implementing Extensive Testing methodologies by our in-house Testing team..
  • Developing effective internal testing mechanism.

And lastly, we believe in partnerships and there too long term relationships. We believe in growing with our clients, and that is why we go the extra mile regardless of the scale of work, or size of client.

Contact:

Nishant Dugar
Assistant BDM, APAC
netPurists
Email: info@netpurists.com

 

Pattern Search in VS.Net 2010

Recently I came across a fresher recently recruited in my company doing a boring and repetitive work of Find and Replace, doing it manually. He was searching for a particular keyword in the code and replacing a couple of line with the new piece of code. He was not using the VS.Net’s Find and Replace box because he needed to search for a Pattern and replace it with another pattern. He was not able to find a better and more accurate way of doing the same. So I thought of helping him and others who find Pattern search complicated by writing this blog and showing the power of Regex Patterns.

So here we go with this example:

Let’s say we want to replace the ‘Sample Code’ Pattern with the ‘Replace with’ Pattern

Sample Code:

Select Case etime

Case EnumECEnt.EnmDisplayMessageType.Alert

Replace with:

Select Case enmtime

Case EnumECEnt.EnmDisplayMessageType.Warning

We have this common piece of code in lots of classes. I now need to change this. I will open the Find and Replace window and use its Regular Expression option. Below is the screenshot:

Enter the relevant text in Find what and Replace with Text boxes as shown above.

We can then search and replace as usually.

How does this work?

If you notice the text in Find what: box, the lines that we are searching for starts with a ‘\’

\ (backslash) in Regex means match all characters after this. It even suppresses special Regex special characters like – [\^$.|?*+(){}

Since we are looking for multi line texts we need to look for Line breaks. This is done by:

\n” – Match a new line character

So wasn’t this really simple? By using just a couple of Regex keywords we were able to do a complicated Find and Replace which could have required tedious manual effort.

I can be reached at hsoni@netpurists.com