Cost reduction, faster recruitment, access to larger talent pools, and efficient custom software development. All of those are the usual benefits of outsourcing. But how does it work from the vendor’s point of view?
How does an experienced software development outsourcing company approach your business challenges, and how can it help your organization? A reliable vendor would apply a custom approach that suits your business context to address each type of challenge. Let us look at how the N-iX experts approach custom software outsourcing.
How custom software development outsourcing can help your project
Different business cases call for different services custom software development outsourcing experts can provide. Over our 20 years of experience with custom software development, we haven’t seen two completely identical projects. N-iX experts know that your business is unique, and so are its needs. So, we split our custom software development services into four major categories to address any of your potential needs.
1. Launch a new project
Approaching a new project, you need a custom software outsourcing service provider who can help you mitigate risks, optimize costs, and speed up the time to market. This is a multi-layered process that includes several stages that take your product from the ideation stage up to market launch and maintenance. In broad terms, you have an idea and our team gives you the expertise to drive that idea forward and turn it into a real product that is going to bring value to your business. That is when we need to assess your requirements, analyze your business needs, study the competitive environment, and come up with the right set of solutions to deliver business value.
We achieve those goals through Product Discovery. With the help of our Technology Office experts, you will find the most efficient way to launch your project, develop a perfect product, test it, certify it (if needed), and launch it to the market. We do that within the planned budget and development timelines.
Read more: Custom offshore software development services: why, how, and where to outsource
Business case: IoT solution prototyping and development for an industrial company
Our client needs to design and develop a new and secure access control system for the outdoor fences and gates. Our team designed a prototype and developed firmware, hardware, and a server-side application. We also took care of all the technical documentation for the project.
The client provided a vision for the product and our team launched product discovery to clarify all the project details, create a project backlog, and select all the necessary technologies and hardware to turn the client’s vision into a product.
We’ve created an embedded hardware and software solution, created communication protocols between the devices, and created a product the way it has been envisioned by the client. As of today, our cooperation continues and we work together to develop an innovative home sensor network based on the latest technologies.
2. Address specific needs with a targeted solution
Many businesses do not have a specific idea for a product but rather a need they try to address. In such cases, the goal of our team is to analyze the specific needs of your business and suggest a cost-efficient solution that will help you achieve your goals.
A need-based solution would depend on the specifics of your organization and the goals you try to achieve. For instance, you might be looking at ways to automate certain processes and reduce the load on your staff. This would cut the time it takes to complete certain tasks and improve the cost-efficiency of your organization. To achieve these goals, you need a custom software outsourcing partner who can properly analyze the current processes within your company and find the best ways to improve them.
So how exactly does N-iX address the specific needs of its clients?
Business case: Transforming digital processes for the UK car business
Our client needed a solution to digitalize the car maintenance and warranty management process. The paperwork flow from the technicians to the workshop and warranty administration has been a tedious process. The client needed to optimize this process.
To help this client, we held a two-week Product Discovery to evaluate the possible solutions and estimate their business impact. We analyzed the current state of things in the organization and the ways we could improve it with the new system. Our team then designed and developed a new warranty tool that allows the client to speed up and simplify the paperwork flow through the chain of users. The tool makes the warranty process seamless and cuts redundant paperwork, which improves the efficiency of the business for the client.
3. Modernize an existing system
It is common for businesses to stick to the tried formulas that brought success in the past as well as technologies that previously yielded great results. But there always comes a time when the old systems stop working as they used to, lose their shine, and drag your business down. That is when you need to rethink and modernize your system to boost its efficiency and bring new life to your IT infrastructure.
System modernization requires meticulous planning and care for the old assets. You cannot just throw parts of your system away and replace them with new ones. You need to gradually migrate all of your assets and data to ensure the uninterrupted functioning of your business during and after the modernization. That is why N-iX approaches legacy system modernization, as a part of custom software development outsourcing service, with business continuity in mind.
Business case: Enterprise application upgradation for a Spanish fashion retailer
The client approached us while in the middle of the digital transformation process. The company sought help with the engineering and automation of certain business processes and systems. One of the legacy processes the client needed to work on was a promotion management system. The client needed a new application that would allow them to create an end-to-end promotion system with all the required features. Then, we also developed a web application that would automate client proposal management to reduce manual labor.
Our team designed the architecture for the promotion and proposal systems and then developed a unified promotion management application. This was meant to cut the use of multiple applications that served the same purpose. We’ve also cooperated with the client’s QA office to implement the QA automation process to improve the quality of an application.
4. Rescue troubled projects with expert developers
Sometimes, you just run into a dead end with a project and need someone to break that wall you are facing. At this point, you might need a rescue mission to put your project back on track and deliver the results you’ve been looking for. Rescue missions are common in custom software outsourcing as the projects can go wrong because of insufficient budgeting, inefficient team cooperation, and many more reasons.
Rescuing a troubled project requires strong expertise from the custom software outsourcing vendor to conduct the assessment of your code and IT infrastructure as a whole. N-iX can help you analyze the current state of the project, find the problem areas, create a roadmap for the project’s transition to the new team, and guide it to a successful launch.
Business case: Routine maintenance and new features for the Danish bike-sharing platform
Bycyklen needed to change a vendor on really short notice, and so they needed a reliable custom software development outsourcing partner to pick up the server-side update process and routine operations. They also needed to finish the development of a mobile application for the clients.
N-iX picked up the backend maintenance for the client’s existing apps and re-engineered the architecture to make it scalable, adopt new features, and handle communication with mobile applications. Our developers came up with a prototype for the new mobile application (iOS and Android) that would support old bikes as well as new-generation bikes. We also handled integration with payment systems, SMS providers, email providers, Open Street maps, and train providers as well as new data analytics features.
The roadmap for successful custom software development outsourcing
Each project has to follow a certain roadmap to achieve its goals. Despite each project being unique, there has to be a structure to outsourcing custom software development. Over the years, the N-iX team adopted a 5-stage approach that enables us to develop high-quality custom software solutions.
1. Discovery or assessment
Every project has to start with an idea, a goal, or a need that has to be addressed in one way or another, and we need a clear understanding of how to do that. That is why our team begins projects with discovery and/or assessment, allowing us to understand what must be done to advance your business interests. This stage helps us with:
- Clarification of client requirements and gathering additional information to validate your product concept;
- Assessment of the challenges you are facing as a business and the ways to address them;
- Audit of the current IT infrastructure and the ways to improve it;
- Creating a plan for the digital transformation and the set of tools we would need.
- Having a precise understanding of your business needs, ideas, and goals, we are ready to move to the next stage.
2. Project starter
You need to start the project with a clear roadmap, and our experts will help you with that:
- Our engineers will set up a proper software development life cycle (SDLC) for the project;
- We will launch the development process according to our best practices and the industry’s top standards: code quality, code review, CI/CD integration, disaster recovery, and more.
Launching the project with a detailed plan for SDLC is the key to the proper achievement of the development milestones. You will need a custom software development outsourcing vendor who can produce a clear roadmap for the project and launch its development with the right set of tools.
3. Development and testing
We combine the development process with software QA and testing to ensure flawless quality of the product across the development stages. Implementation of QA across the SDLC reduces the chance of errors, cutting costs and increasing the speed of development by avoiding overheads. Our team will:
- Define the optimal structure of the team to fulfill your project requirements fast and without redundant spending;
- Apply the best development practices such as Agile methodology;
- Use the industry’s best tools, programming languages, and test frameworks to secure full-stack SDLC;
- Automate the testing process or adopt a testing strategy that suits your project.
4. Release preparation
It is important for the custom software outsourcing vendor to handle all the market launch preparations to ensure the perfect performance of the product. For us, it is also vital to provide you with all the supplementary information on how to handle the product in the long run, ensuring its longevity:
- Documentation preparation;
- Additional release testing: performance, scalability, security, accessibility;
- Release strategy;
- Pre-launch adjustments according to the Service-Level Agreement.
5. Maintenance
The product needs continuous support and maintenance after the release, and our experts provide these services to make sure your product keeps running smoothly. You will also need to update and scale your product up as the market trends and user requirements change.
- Production and maintenance support;
- Service operation support;
- Adjusting product configurations.
Proper implementation of this SDLC in custom software outsourcing allows us to deliver successful projects to clients who struggle to launch new products. Naturally, this approach can be modified to meet certain specifics of each project, which allows for greater flexibility when outsourcing custom software development services.
Read more: How to choose the right custom software development company?
Why industry leaders trust N-iX as a custom software development provider
- We are a team of over 2,200 professionals who offer expertise in IoT and Embedded Software, Big Data, Machine Learning, and Data Science, to name a few.
- N-iX is a one-stop-shop custom software outsourcing service provider that can take any project from the ideation stage, up to market-launch, and beyond. We provide expert software development services across industries like automotive, fintech, healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, and more.
- We have more than 21 years of experience and combine it with operational flexibility by applying a development approach that matches your business case.
- N-iX is more than just a custom software outsourcing vendor, we build successful long-term partnerships. We are an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, a Google Cloud Platform Partner, a Microsoft gold certified partner, an SAP partner, and an OpenText Services silver partner.
- Our Technology Office ensures the highest standards of engineering quality and delivery services.
- Our experts currently run 100+ active projects and deliver 50+ PoC, MVP, and Discoveries every year.
