2020 has brought sweeping changes to all markets, industries, and businesses. The OpenText ECM and CCM consulting market has been getting hotter and now it has faced new challenges - from the sudden shift to remote work and travel bans to H1 visa restrictions in the USA and new patterns of hiring OpenText developers.
According to the comprehensive report by Markets and Markets, the global Enterprise Content Management market size is projected to grow from $40.1B in 2020 to $66.9B by 2025. So the way we work has changed, but the need for experienced OpenText developers is more pressing than ever, and companies are rethinking their strategies to adapt to the new normal and keep their OpenText systems up and running.
Since the global shift to remote work has proved to be successful so far, hiring remote OpenText developers in offshore locations, such as Eastern Europe, has become the only way out even for enterprises who’ve never considered it before.
Brand-new reasons for hiring remote OpenText developers
The main reason why companies outsource OpenText consulting is cost-efficiency. Based on the recent data provided by Indeed, the average salary for "opentext consultant" reaches $102,948 per year for Senior Consultant. While, the rates of OpenText developers in Eastern Europe are much lower and the quality and commitment are often higher because of the competition with on-site professionals.
Hiring remote OpenText developers makes even more sense during the Covid-19 triggered downturn. So what has changed?
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Covid-19 and lockdowns - hiring remote OpenText developers is the new normal
Global lockdowns and travel restrictions definitely had a negative impact on business and changed a lot of aspects of how we do business. But they had some unexpected positive impact as well, such as increased flexibility, better work-life balance, and improved productivity. For example, according to the PwC study, 28% of employees and 44% of employers report that they are even more productive at home. So more and more people prefer to continue working remotely full time.
Before Covid-19, most companies required OpenText developers and consultants to work on-site. They strongly believed in the effectiveness of this well-established approach, face-to-face collaboration, and the importance of hands-on experience with on-site processes and technologies. However, now most of the staff on payroll is working from home. And companies are reviewing their internal corporate policies regarding hiring offshore OpenText consultants. The recent global shift in working patterns has proved that outsourcing OpenText consulting has always been underestimated, and today around 28% of businesses are looking to outsourcing as a Covid-19 survival strategy. Companies intend to reduce the Covid-19 risk through outsourcing by developing greater business agility and resilience.
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H1 visa restrictions in the USA force companies to outsource OpenText consulting
According to the Credence Research report, which predicts a significant growth of the global Customer Communications Management market, North America is expected to be the highest revenue-generating region, with the US contributing a high market share, followed by Canada.
However, in June, the Trump administration announced expansive new bans on worker visas – in addition to restrictions on new green cards– claiming this would protect American jobs and stimulate economic recovery in the US. This has reportedly affected as many as 525,000 foreign workers, including a lot of OpenText developers working as on-site consultants.
The National Bureau of Economic Research paper looked at data on visas issued by the US government and its effect on the activities of multinational companies. It found out that restrictive migration policies led to offshoring jobs, rather than keeping them in the USA. A lot of US companies that had previously hired on-site OpenText consultants, started outsourcing OpenText development and enjoyed multiple benefits of such cooperation, in particular, flexibility, access to a larger talent pool, better value for money, to name a few.
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Flexibility and established remote working practices of remote OpenText consulting teams
Another benefit of partnering with remote OpenText developers is their remote-readiness. For instance, N-iX and our Professional Services Unit have been working in remote and distributed teams for over a decade. Our clients range from Fortune 500 leaders to innovative technology companies that come from all over the world, the biggest share falling for North America and Western Europe. For years, we have polished our remote work practices - from ensuring the highest level of security to establishing seamless communication wherever our clients are based.
Besides, remote cooperation with OpenText developers, N-iX offers hybrid models when our experts combine on-site and remote work - visiting the client’s location at the project kick-off and the roll-out phase, for example. So you can get the best quality service and avoid the struggle of finding affordable yet well-qualified on-site OpenText developers.
Destinations for hiring remote OT developers
The global changes of 2020 have forced many organizations using OpenText to rethink their outsourcing policies. At many companies it was not allowed to hire remote OpenText developers at all, although it is one of the tempting solutions. Such internal policies are changing now and businesses start looking for the most lucrative OpenText outsourcing locations.
So where to hire skilled remote OpenText developers?
India
The most popular destinations for outsourcing OpenText consulting are India, China, and the Philippines. Indeed, they have a huge number of software engineers. However, a lot of partnerships with Indian, Chinese, and Philippine OpenText developers go downhill because of differences in business culture and poor service quality.
Therefore, a lot of companies look at alternative IT outsourcing hubs, many of which are located in Eastern Europe, which is culturally much closer to North America and Western Europe and boasts a lot of skilled engineers.
Eastern Europe
A.T. Kearney Global Services Location Index 2019 listed nine Eastern European countries among the best outsourcing destinations, primarily due to their financial attractiveness. Eastern European tech talent pool comprises over 1M professional developers with Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and Romania taking the leading positions on the market.
According to recent research by AIN.ua, a respected Ukrainian tech media, there are about 300,000 IT professionals in Ukraine. Also, Ukraine has the largest number of outsourcing vendors in the region (1,600), followed by Poland (500+), Bulgaria (500), and Belarus (500).
OpenText expertise is hard to come by, which spikes up the salaries of OpenText developers. On the Ukrainian market, N-iX is the most mature company that has wide experience in multiple OpenText products. We had been the partner of OpenText for several years, helping the company develop one of its key solutions. Today, OpenText Professional Services Unit at N-iX comprises around 40 experienced OpenText developers, specializing in a wide range of OpenText modules and products.
Criteria for choosing a remote OpenText developers team
Choosing the location for outsourcing OpenText consulting is the first important step. But finding a reliable OpenText consulting provider is more challenging. The choice is not that wide, and there are quite a few criteria to consider:
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A reliable OpenText consulting company with seamless communication
One of the best ways to check the reliability of your potential OpenText consulting partner is to explore its project case studies and look through the client reviews on the vendor’s website, in Google and Facebook reviews, or on Clutch.
From the outset, you should consider how the company communicates with you, whether it cares enough to respond to emails in time, has similar business ethics, and has experience in setting up remote communication and work processes. Your remote OpenText developers should always be in touch with you to make remote cooperation work and make you feel that your project is a top priority.
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OpenText consulting provider of the right size - 500-1,000 employees with diverse tech expertise
Working with freelance OpenText developers adds a lot of management overhead and risks. On the other hand, hiring outsourced OpenText developers with the help of a strong reliable IT service provider offers a lot of benefits.
First, an established OpenText consulting provider has well-established processes, controls the quality, can ramp up or down your team when needed, and shares the project risks with you. Secondly, you can always tap into additional engineering expertise when needed, and your OpenText developers will get the necessary help if they face a bottleneck.
So your OpenText consulting vendor should be big enough to scale your team and provide diverse expertise, but small enough to prioritize your project and care about your business. For instance, at N-iX we have a unit of 30+ experienced OpenText developers backed by the company of 1,000 engineers specializing in Cloud-native services, Data analytics and engineering, DevOps, embedded software, UI/UX, and more.
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A strong focus on security
The most common security risks any organization faces nowadays include Infrastructure vulnerabilities, phishing attacks, the physical safety of devices, outdated incident response plans, etc. When you partner with remote OpenText developers, you should consider all these issues and formulate a strong security policy.
Also, your OpenText consulting provider should comply with key info security regulations and standards, such as ISO 27001 (administrative and physical controls to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information assets). To comply with international security standards, IT companies undergo regular audits and cooperate with authorized third parties to perform regular cybersecurity assessments. For instance, Bureau Veritas runs audits for ISO 27001:2013 and ISO 9001:2015 audits for N-iX. In addition, N-iX has Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan in place which covers test scenarios for infrastructure, network, and physical security; load VPN tests; network security attacks; power and server failures, etc.
More about ensuring top-level security in the time of remote in our blog.
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Experience working with your domain and market
Domain expertise is vital in OpenText consulting. With over ten years of OpenText consulting experience, N-iX experts have delivered over 150 projects in various domains, including utilities, telecom, pharmaceutical, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, and other industries. Also, our OpenText developers have deployed OpenText solutions both remotely and on customer sites in 27 countries on all continents. Our customer geography includes the USA, the UK, Canada, Germany, Brazil, the UAE, the Republic of South Africa, South Korea, India, Australia, etc. Also, in recent years, we have significantly grown our US presence.
6 steps to set up remote work with your OpenText developers
Different companies have different levels of remote readiness. While most IT outsourcing providers have tried and tested processes in place, many enterprises find it hard to adapt to the remote world. Here are the main steps you need to take to set up effective cooperation with your remote OpenText developers:
- Select the cooperation model that fits you - a T&M project, a fixed price project, or dedicated OpenText developers for Application Managed Services.
- Work with your remote OpenText developers to develop a strict security policy.
- Choose a provider who can establish effective agile processes to ensure the productivity of your remote OpenText team and successful project delivery.
- Work together to streamline effective communication, considering cultural differences, time zones, and preferred communications tools.
- Choose and use the same collaboration tools. They could include Jira for task tracking and reporting, Slack for instant messaging, Google Meets for video calls, Confluence for documentation, Google Drive for file management. You can choose any but there should be clarity between you and your remote Open Text developers about this.
- Hybrid cooperation with outsourced OpenText developers is also an option. For instance, N-iX OpenText consultants often combine remote and co-located work. Our experts come on-site during the most critical project phases, such as kick-off and solution rollout, which require a lot of communication and work with internal systems.
Read more about setting up and managing an outsourced team in the time of remote.
Why leading enterprises partner with N-iX OpenText consultants
- N-iX has been working with OpenText products since 2005, and in 2014, N-iX became an official OpenText partner.
- N-iX has over 35 OpenText certified consultants who have a strong technical background in development, product integration, database services, and network connectivity.
- N-iX provided R&D and software development services to OpenText and before that to StreamServe (acquired by OpenText), so we know OpenText product suite better that any other vendor.
- Our OpenText Professional Services team is a part of N-iX, a leading European software development company with over 1,100 IT specialists on board. Therefore, we offer access to a wide engineering talent pool.
- We cooperate with companies around the globe, so we understand the importance of cultural awareness, common business ethics, and take an individual approach to each client.
- N-iX has well-established remote and hybrid work processes in place to ensure every client’s success during these challenging times.
