Western Corporations Look to Benefit from Web Portal Development in India

A broad definition of 'web portal' covers web sites so varying in specialization, size, target audience, and structure that making a dissection of the market structure of web portal development in India is a task close to impossible. Nevertheless, based on market reports by Gartnter, Inc., one can make a safe bet that the trend of outsourcing projects is set to grow in the long-run, with the country topping the list of places where the software and web development outsourcing is flourishing.

Public web portals emerged in a natural way a few decades ago, offering valuable services like free e-mail, aggregated news, stock market quotes, etc. In fact, most of the widely popular public web portals have been developed outside India, mainly in the United States. At present, however, India is an unrivaled leader in world's software development outsourcing, including development of web portals, in a broader sense. Additionally, India has managed to establish a number of research and development centers, apart from traditional universities and colleges, where well-educated professionals graduate.

Average users tend to think that only a handful of worth-mentioning web portals exist on a global scale. Although such a statement has valid grounds when the matter in hand is which web portals we use to access news sources and e-mail services on a daily basis, a web portal, as said before, is a product that web surfers use much more often than usually anticipated. Those who deal with the services of the e-government on a daily basis are a good example of customers visiting a web portal regularly, while those may include services like healthcare, social insurance, unemployment services, etc. Thus, the market for web portal services is not limited to the commercial use of the product but also covers the public sector, which rapidly adopts online services.

A booming market for mobile devices worldwide is another major factor that boosts development of various web portals aimed at users in every niche imaginable. Furthermore, existing web portals have to be re-developed to provide reliable services to sky-rocketing number of mobile users, while software development in the West is costly compared to services offered by India's peers. Therefore, thanks to a combination of growing in numbers skilled software developers and lower payroll costs, India is becoming a major hub for development of various software applications and web-based solutions. The country still leads the pack of global destinations for high-quality and non-expensive software development, competing on equal terms with software developers based in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

A growing number of U.S. and Europe-based corporations outsource development of their intranet web portals to developers in India, which sparked fierce debates in the United States, and the driving force behind this evident trend is not purely economical – the lower production costs – but has its roots in the quality of service provided by local software developers. Despite some regulatory measures, taken by the U.S. and the European Union authorities, the business is increasingly looking to the Asia/Pacific region in search for affordable and high-quality software development services. That being said, one would safely forecast that web portal development in India, in particular, and software development outsourcing, in general, will be among the fastest growing segments of India's economy in the next decade.