More and more companies opt for outsourced product development, as it allows them to save both time and costs. However, establishing the right form of cooperation with a partner that can help you successfully adopt the latest technology trends can be challenging.
To make it easier for you, we will describe the most common cooperation models, provide tips on choosing the right partner, and show a real-life example of successful outsourced software product development. Let’s begin.
Why choose Custom Solution Development?
Custom Solution Development is one of the 3 main software outsourcing models. It offers the full cycle of product development, from a feasibility study to the delivery of a full-fledged solution. Therefore, it is the most fitting model for end-to-end outsourced product development. Let’s take a look at its biggest advantages.
Obtain a clear roadmap for your product idea
Though not mandatory, this type of cooperation usually starts with a Discovery phase (DP). At N-iX, a Solution Group is responsible for this process, which consists of Business Analysts, System Architects, and UX engineers.
This team analyzes your business idea and proves its feasibility. More importantly, it can transform an idea that had no clear vision into a documented project roadmap with engineering requirements and technical specifications.
A Discovery Phase is useful in 2 cases:
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Building a product from scratch. Prove the concept of your idea, identify potential risks, gather requirements, align business goals with specific user needs, and finalize the scope of work that needs to be done.
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Extending an existing complex system. Evaluate the current state of the system, define the scope for transformation, assess the potential risks and bottlenecks, and find ways to address them.
Enjoy end-to-end product development
The main goal of Custom Solution Development is entrusting the entire process of software product development to a tech partner that can do it quickly and efficiently.
Thus, you do not have to participate in interviewing, recruiting, and managing your tech experts. Your partner builds a development team with the required capacity and expertise to deliver your product. The partner also assigns a dedicated project manager(s) who handles all of the team’s day-to-day operations and provides you with regular progress reports.
This allows you to focus on other important business-related processes while your partner handles the technical part.
Retain your flexibility and adaptability
Custom Solution Development projects are usually longer-lasting partnerships that focus on achieving goals on the scale of the entire business. This creates a great degree of flexibility since it enables you to change or find new ways of achieving those goals.
As a result, the model is highly adaptable to market changes. More importantly, it is very receptive to the implementation of new technologies and outsourced product development trends.
Other cooperation models for product development
There are two other models of outsourcing that can also be used for product development. However, they are somewhat more effective at delivering other types of projects.
Extended Team
This is the most common and the most simple form of outsourcing. Your partner provides experts with the required tech expertise who essentially become a part of your in-house team. The team works on developing your product while you take care of day-to-day management and guidance.
This model offers great scaling flexibility. It is best used in case you already have all development processes in place and simply require additional talent or expertise to speed up product delivery.
Managed Team
In this model, instead of separate experts, you get a full, self-sufficient development team that gets integrated into your delivery organization. Recruitment, management, and all day-to-day operations are handled by your partner. As a result, team formation happens a lot quicker.
This team works along with your in-house experts on delivering a common product. However, each team is responsible for the development of its own separate part, for example, a feature, or a platform version. Managed Teams use the project roadmap and technical requirements that you provide to implement your product vision.
How to find a reliable partner for outsourced product development: By technology trends
Making sure your potential tech partner has sufficient expertise in the outsourced product development trend you need can be challenging. Therefore, we have prepared some tips to help you find the right one.
What to look for in a cloud services provider
- Expertise in IaaS/SaaS/PaaS (Infrastructure/Software/Platform as a Service);
- Ability to complete cloud assessments of complex IT architecture;
- Enough experience and capacity to ensure smooth migration to the cloud;
- Experience with various cloud vendors (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and multi-cloud migration;
- Experience with migrating to private, public, or hybrid cloud.
What to look for in a microservices provider
- Expertise with Data modeling;
- Available engineers with asynchronous and event-driven programming skills;
- Experience with API development;
- Solid knowledge of orchestration technologies (Kubernetes, Swarm, etc.);
- Understanding and experience with Docker;
- Adoption of Agile culture;
- Experience and willingness to form long-lasting partnerships with post-development support.
What to look for in an AI services provider
- Proven expertise in AI technologies (Python, R, C, Scala, Hadoop, etc.);
- Experienced data scientists and data engineers;
- Capacity for quick team scaling;
- Capacity for creating a dedicated R&D center;
- Experience with AI projects in your specific industry.
What to look for in a DevOps services provider
- Solid cloud adoption expertise (migration, optimization, architecture);
- Experience with Configuration Management, Delivery Pipeline, and Continuous Integration (CI/CD);
- Experience with orchestrating and automating infrastructure, as well as Monitoring, Logging, and Alerting;
- Expertise in Security Infrastructure.
Outsourced product development for a Global Fortune 100 company: Success story
Let’s take a look at a real-life example of successful outsourced product development to see how much a company can gain from such partnerships.
A Global Fortune 100 engineering and technology company from Germany (under NDA) approached N-iX to transform their internal logistics platform. The existing solution lacked efficiency and sufficient scaling capabilities to be used in 400+ warehouses across more than 60 countries.
After forming a Custom Solution Development partnership with N-iX, the company was able to redevelop their solution and take full advantage of some of the latest technological trends.
Cloud computing
The N-iX team implemented the cloud-native infrastructure, which allows the platform to be scaled quickly across warehouses. Furthermore, the company became more flexible at mitigating expenses, as this enables it to easily deploy the platform either on-premise or any cloud provider.
Microservices
One of the core reasons behind the platform’s lack of scalability was its monolithic architecture. By migrating the platform to microservices, the N-iX team makes it more flexible. Moreover, this enables the smooth addition of various SaaS services, such as route recommendations, Optical Character Recognition of box labels, delivery prediction, and more.
Computer Vision and Machine Learning
Our team is applying advanced Computer Vision (CV) algorithms to introduce automatic goods tracking with optical sensors. Additionally, by implementing Continuous Delivery, we have enabled constant training, testing, deployment, monitoring, and operation of Machine Learning models.
As a result, the solution (which is currently in development) will streamline and automate many warehouse processes. These include detection of arriving packages, scanning labels and barcodes, and changing delivery statuses.
DevOps
Finally, the team provided DevOps services to set up a more efficient development environment. This ensures faster development, Quality Assurance (QA), and deployment processes.
Ukraine: a top location for outsourced product development
Eastern Europe has long been one of the most common regions where companies look for tech partners. And, the largest country in the region, Ukraine, is unsurprisingly one of the top destinations of outsourced software product development. Let’s see why.
The largest outsourcing talent pool in Europe
Ukraine boasts the largest pool of experts available for outsourcing in the region. It already numbers over 200K, and, as the popularity of the IT industry in Ukraine grows, so does the talent pool. ICT and STEM universities provide over 30K graduates every year, making Ukraine one of the fastest-growing destinations for outsourced product development.
Long-term partnerships with leading enterprises
Some of the largest and most successful global enterprises choose Ukrainian tech vendors as their partners for outsourced product development. Local companies have many years (or decades) of outsourcing experience and are therefore not afraid to tackle complex, longer-lasting projects that improve their clients’ businesses on multiple levels.
Many world’s leading enterprises have outsourcing partners in Ukraine, such as Gogo, Lebara, Siemens, and Fluke.
Wide-ranging tech expertise for outsourced software product development
Ukraine has some of Eastern Europe’s highest numbers of experts that specialize in modern technologies and development trends. Local outsourcing vendors can provide you with experts in any technology you may require, from Data Scientists to DevOps and Cloud computing engineers.
Why choose N-iX as your partner for outsourced product development
- N-iX holds a talent pool of 2,200+ engineers who are proficient in the latest outsourced software product development trends, including microservices, Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, and more;
- With nearly 21 years of outsourcing experience, we have solid expertise in forming long-lasting partnerships with the world’s leading enterprises;
- N-iX has successfully delivered projects in a wide range of industries, including finance, telecom, healthcare, and manufacturing.
