Outsourcing software development to Poland – a new destination for professional IT services  drukuj

Many European IT companies, especially the ones from Western Europe, decide to outsource their software development tasks, in order to increase their profit through reducing development costs. The reason for this is that these costs are the major and highest ones in the whole software development process. In such case IT providers outside Europe are being chosen mostly, where prices are significantly lower than average European level. But then serious drawbacks of this solution begin to reveal.

First of all communication issues occur. Foreign countries, far away from Europe, may be in different time zone – so time difference is serious and time span to communicate bilateral is much shorter. Furthermore there could be different cultural habits, so even such trivial thing like different national holidays and ceremonies, free of work, may harm communication between parties. Not to mention other cultural and legal distinctions – like different labour policies, pauses in work, number of working hours allowed in a week etc. On the other hand there is also distance, what we must take under our consideration – sometimes there is need to work on site, not always remote working is possible or required. Thus we must take into account significantly higher transportation fees, as usually the ordering party, not the provider, pays it.

Last but not least is the most important drawback – serious quality lacks. All difficulties mentioned above lead up to substantial problem with maintaining constant quality control and jeopardise the overall outcome. For most demanding clients and complex projects it is unacceptable.

But there is a solution. Just outsource your software development from Europe to… Europe! Doesn’t make sense? Actually it does – you can find in Europe a country, where no communication, cultural, territorial or quality issues occur. source: Wikimedia CommonsIt is Poland – central European country, with IT professionals meeting highest European quality standards, but still with labour costs considerably lower than in Western Europe. Thanks to being a member of the European Union, Poland is a convenient partner in software business, because there are no legal obstacles to cooperate with Polish IT companies both remotely and on site.

What about the quality? Polish programmers have always shined with their outstanding programming capabilities – which is why some of the world’s best known technology companies, including Google (with currently 2 research centres in Poland), Motorola and IBM (in collaboration with Wroclaw Research Centre), have decided to set up research centres just in Poland. Polish IT professionals have very strong academic background what guarantees the highest level of IT developers’ education. Adducing the last TopCoder’s country rankings (TopCoder is the world’s largest competitive software development community with 226,851 developers representing over 200 countries) 4 polish universities have placed the top 25 school worldwide: University of Warsaw (1st place in 2005!), University of Wroclaw, Jagiellonian University and Poznan University of Technology.

Staying with TopCoder competitions – these programmer rankings are based on individual and university achievements and Poles regularly lead both sections. In 2005 Poland has left the US behind and taken first place in TopCoder’s country ranking. Currently (2009) Poland take third place.

Listed below are some more of the successes achieved by Polish programmers – in the Imagine Cup, the world’s premier student technology competition, hosted by Microsoft Corporation:

• Imagine Cup 2009 (Cairo, Egypt):
  MashUp – second place
  Interoperability Award – second place
  H.E. Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak Special Award – winner

• Imagine Cup 2008 (Paris, France):
  Embedded Development – third place

• Imagine Cup 2007 (Seoul, South Korea):
  Algorithm – first place

• Imagine Cup 2006 (Delhi, India):
  Algorithm – first, second and third place (!)

As highlighted above – Poland turns out to be a perfect destination for outsourcing software development, with no obstacles typical for outsourcing countries outside Europe, with outstanding IT capabilities and highest quality standards but still in attractive prices. Sounds like a bargain – and in fact it is! So when you are going to develop a software and you need to enlarge your development team for this or you simply don’t have staff available to make it – don’t hire anyone but use outsourcing to Poland. It is fast and convenient way for delivering high quality, complex software on place, on time, on budget.