Startups and small-to-medium companies worldwide are actively using IT outsourcing to reach their business goals. Actually, partnering with a reliable IT outsourcing company to obtain technical expertise is literally the only way to go if you have a startup idea and money, but don’t have a team at hand.
Many startups decide to try their luck first and hire anyone they can to their team in hopes to get the job done. However, this involves lengthy recruitment with uncertain results, as good professionals are not easy to come by, and the startups rarely got sufficient funding to attract top-tier talents. In addition, A-grade developers rarely work for financial gain solely, they have to be motivated with either a brilliant idea, a noble goal or an sizeable variety of tasks.
While many startups believe they serve a noble goal, and their ideas are quite often brilliant — the products themselves are rarely truly innovative. After all, all apps have to have a front-end and a back-end part, interact with some UI and store some data in a database, run atop some server or virtual machine and scale up and down in some way. Thus said, once the product architecture is agreed upon, the following is just the process of doing what was done a hundred times before. And the bigger the product gets, the less novelty remains and the more routine sets in.
This is exactly why good developers and DevOps engineers don’t like working on a single project for too long, They need some challenge to drive them forward, and doing the same for years is not very satisfying. Thus many of them and up working for Managed Services Providers — the IT outsourcing services companies that lend their technical expertise to businesses to allow them to accomplish the project.
What pros and cons are there in IT outsourcing for small business?
First of all, outsourcing IT tasks and workloads to one of reliable Managed Services Providers grants instant access to teams of highly-skilled professionals with polished workflows. You don’t have to hire recruiters to find and attract the required talents, so instead of the time-consuming recruitment process, you can start working on your project at once.
Secondly, working with IT outsourcing companies means your R&D expenses have been already paid by previous customers, so the risk of mistakes is minimal. Talents from the IT outsourcing business have faced most of the problems before and have ready solutions for most of the cases.
Third, IT outsourcing services are usually provided by businesses from regions like Eastern Europe, where the cost of living is significantly lower, as compared to the US and EU. This means that high-level talents are much more affordable, so overall project budget can be cut by 30-40%, as compared to hiring an internal IT team to do the job.
Fourth, if you go for IT outsourcing cloud computing services, this ensures that the company you work with guarantees the continuity of the partnership. Should one team member get ill or quit, a replacement is usually at hand. Quite the contrary, having 2 specialists in-house for one position is not wise for a startup, while the absence of a crucial team member can put the whole project on halt.
What about the cons then? There are but two:
- You don’t have direct control over your dedicated team, as a Project Manager acts as a point of contact. You tell him what you want and he forms the tasks to ensure this can be done, delegates them to the team and reports to you on the project progress. This is not actually bad, as you can concentrate on growing your business instead.
- You can’t know if the team is actually qualified before the project starts. The best way to avoid it is to meet with the team during the project discussion stage and check with their previous customers for references. Good IT outsourcing companies have a list of satisfied customers that can prove the quality of their services.
Thus said, IT outsourcing is very beneficial for small business. Just find a trustworthy contractor and create your next great product!