Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Thoughts from Central Europe #1: Outsourcing Options

I’m in Munich this week at the OOP 2007 conference. I’ve been stalking the exhibition and chatting with vendors. I’m amazed at the number who are outsourcing or offering outsourced services and the range of options. In the USA, we’re used to having two main options - China or India. Here in Europe there are a lot more options. One vendor offered to undercut my Indian test vendor on price by doing my testing in Israel. He claimed that he wasn’t as cheap as the Chinese but he’d easily beat any price from India. It seems that the Indians are already having to differentiate themselves on quality!

Other options I heard were Lithuania, Estonia and Bulgaria. Interesting that Poland, Czech and Hungary already seem to be off the outsourcing radar.

There are some clear advantages for the Europeans with these outsourcing options - the main one I can see is time zone compatibility and its close neighbor geographic proximity that facilitates cheap travel between vendor and customer. In some cases a mere train ride away. It seems to me that Europe is better placed to build a software development value chain than America. And that as a result, technologies that facilitate value chain development such as software factories, ALM tools like VSTS, and analysis and modeling techniques that enable cleanly partitioned, well encapsulated, loosely coupled, highly cohesive architecture are more likely to gain traction first in Europe than in America. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, OOP+2007