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Today outsourcing technology development is a big way in which companies in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland compete, according to Lee Tedstone sales and marketing director of Nvolve Limited Outsourcing service.
Tedstone states. Thats why companies are continuing to watch spend and return on investment ROI in development of their applications he says.Nvolves outsourcing service is based in Northern Ireland with offices in the Republic of Ireland and India, specializing in the development of outsourcing to India while keeping the project and account management in Ireland.
Tedstone says Our team of project and account managers based here in Ireland provides the strategic and technology direction for our developers based in India allowing us to maintain close working relationships with our client while our developers concentrate on being able to provide cost effective high quality development resources.
Tedstone says cost was not the major issue in managements decision to set up our outsource business. Instead, it was availability of highly skilled labor. Nvolve went through this process them selves in development of their learning management software and want to share the benefits with other Irish operations. Talented people were in short supply when we were engaged in our product development. We were unable to secure the coding skills we needed at any sort of reasonable cost, so the company took a steak holding in a software development centre in India, the director explains.
Tedstone says his operation has been growing ever since because Nvolve continues to improve its service and product offerings.Today the Irish operation actually offshores part of its applications development to its Indian operation to maximize the benefits. Tedstone says that the company utilizes different skill sets at their Indian centre. Tasks like reengineering projects are best shipped to India. Thats when, for example, software designed for one platform must be modified so that it runs on a different platform or database. We like the cost savings as well as the availability of the relevant skills, he says of his Indian centre. The subject matter and expertise tends to stay in Ireland.
Tedstone says his programmers are trained to specialize in particular aspects of Sharepoint, .Net, SQL Server and IIS Internet Information Server. Software engineers typically work as part of larger teams based mainly in the US, Ireland or mainland Europe. The multinational workforce means members on both sides of the pond need to be articulated about the specs and requirements. There are welldocumented methodologies and lots of video and audio conferences available.
However, Tedstone says The need to travel never goes away because the work requires facetoface meetings with the business units, but we have over come this by utilising our Irish based project managers and technologists. At first our clients dont always know all the information that they need to tell our project managers. This is why it is critical to have locally based bilingual specialists who can translate all the required information while building working relationships with individuals onsite. Our projects are small in numbers but are very sophisticated, he says.
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