Cost and speed were attainable through significant management, legal and procedural overhead that only large organizations can afford to dedicate resources towards. Meanwhile, small to mid-sized companies faced a huge amount of challenge and hassle when leveraging resources in other countries to build solutions necessary to run and grow their business.
Let’s face it, there has been a long-standing belief that leveraging offshore talent is a second tier option to hiring US talent at our companies. Though that may have been the case, I’m here to tell you that the times are changing. One company, Baufest, is reinventing the face of offshore development models and proving to CTOs and CIOs like myself that boutique co-development partners aren’t just a great model to use, but can even exceed local FTE talent without downside.
Baufest’s boutique software, data and infrastructure co-development is a hybrid model (local talent with offshore) where teams work in concert with client’s so they can achieve their goals. This is world-class, high-caliber, precision resources. Baufest is a team you actually want (dare I say love) to work with. Gone are the days of blind execution of requirements, time-zone challenges and cultural misunderstanding.
When I first spoke to Neil Beam, the Head of Customer Success for Baufest here in North America, we discussed both of our past experiences, good and bad – but mostly bad. The details don’t matter, the pattern is common: middle of the night calls, misunderstandings, a lot of promises not met and a team that felt like they were just grinding out a deliverable with the least amount of effort expended to get the job done.
Neil, in contrast, can and is crafting the co-development experience that we all wished we could hire – even from our own FTE or IT partners at our own companies. He knows exactly what we want because he lived it personally. The company Neil described back to me is unlike any offshore firm I’d heard about in the past. First, he is doing this by challenging the status quo about work-based power, trust, knowledge, fear, honesty, interdependency and transparency. It feels like a club more than a company. Boutique doesn’t mean small they just act small given Baufest has hundreds of people in areas such as development, data analytics, infrastructure and security with most everyone capable of speaking two or more languages.
No, this is a very different kind of company. They have purpose and know why they are in business: to make our lives better. Finally, a development team that actually works for me, on my pace, to achieve my goals, on budget.
In my opinion, as software engineering continues to be in growing demand, as more and more solutions get increasingly sophisticated to build and support, companies in the US (especially ones located outside of major urban areas) we will have to be more flexible to where their talent is coming from.
Importantly, the global push for corporations to invest heavily in technology will drive your need to find talent local to whatever country they operate in; I think we will see an increased proliferation of reliable and vetted technology partners making offshoring that much more accessible. As a CIO, I’m excited to see how we can expand our technology footprint to help our company continue to grow as we look to see where partners like Baufest may be able to help.
By: Dan Maycock