Call it what you want. IT outsourcing, offshore, or nearshore, companies have been hiring outsource software development teams in Puerto Rico for multiple reasons.
Be it cost reductions, better talent, special projects, or finding expertise that companies can’t get in-house, this trend has been growing for the past 25 years. Companies started focusing on their core competencies and began outsourcing their IT and software development operations elsewhere. India benefitted the most from this trend.
But having tried this model all these years has revealed that it is not easy to manage a team that’s thousands of miles away. Issues like intellectual property protection, information security, language and communication barriers, timezone difference, and political instability represent a challenge that most companies aren’t ignoring anymore.
We want to offer you Nearshore as an alternative. Wikipedia says that “Nearshoring is the transfer of business or IT processes to companies in a nearby country, often sharing a border with your own country”. As the title suggests, Puerto Rico is one of those alternatives but with one advantage that no one else can offer. Puerto Rico is part of the US. We are all US citizens and Federal law applies here as much as in New York.
In our case, we can even call it Inshoring. That is “offshoring that has been brought back onshore”.
Based in San Juan, Wovenware has clients in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, US Virgin Islands, Alberta (Canada), and London. We were recently hired by a company to substitute a software development team they had in Romania. We now provide services to four of their clients.
The reason for the change: quality and timezone issues. Not only could we provide quality with our engineers and computer scientists but we were in the same timezone and travel time is only a few hours away. Although still lower than US rates, price became a secondary issue.
Other reasons include Intelectual Property protection. Being part of the US, our customer’s IP is protected by Federal Copyright and Patent Laws. According to the 2013 UPS Change in the (Supply) Chain Survey, 55% of high tech companies cited “Improving control over quality and intellectual property” as their main driver to nearshore.
There are lots of stories like this from companies that outsourced their software development teams to the wrong partner for the wrong reasons. We believe that there are very compelling reasons to consider a partner like Wovenware to help you with your software development needs. The top 5 reasons are:
- Quality
- IP Protection
- Distance
- Price
- Culture
We will expand on each of these issues in a series of blogs during the following weeks. In the mean time, we have prepared the following Infographic to show you the top reasons to consider us.
So remember, no matter what name you use for it: offshore, nearshore, or inshore, consider the benefits to you company and think of Wovenware as your partner for you software development.
