Product Selection: Assessing Offshore Friendliness

The offshoring juggernaut has blasted several traditional beliefs in the course of its journey. One of the myths busted is that the package software consulting, development and deployment can not leverage the offshore model. Today offshore majors are making it a reality to leverage offshoring in good measure in virtually every form of IT work – consulting to packaged solution deployment. Apoorv brings home the point that the licensing policies of product vendors(in this case CMS vendors) are a major hindrance to offshoring. He is spot on. I find it really surprising that in this age where offshoring is seen to be increasingly becoming a dominant force.To facilitate offshore development, it is a common practice to set up development environment offshore during the development phase - this typically calls for setting up instances of CMS, database & probably an application server/portal server locally. Normally revocable licenses valid through the various stages of offshore engagement are to be provided by customers – that’s when problems like this occur - most of the packaged software vendors( I think I should say roughly one half ) policies of licensing as they are box or CPU centric, forces customers to procure additional licenses –simply because development licenses are not given free or sufficiently liberally bundles along with product licenses. This is proving to be a small deterrent for offshoring and as such needs to be set right. I also note that while most product companies are routinely offshoring their engineering work (either through captive facilities or by working with offshore vendors), I notice that most of them routinely ignore the framework that their users should consider for offshoring development work in their implementation methodologies – the big boys are no exception here . next time buyers when you purchase licenses/listen to bids, ask product vendors a question - how offshore friendly is their licensing policies and implementation methodologies. After all TCO calculations need to factor this requirement in and assess benefits..