Benefits of Outsourcing to Software Consulting Firm in India

Software consulting has many faces, making it hard to provide a universal suggestion whether a particular project should be outsourced, but a consulting firm in India can offer to benefits that rivals based in the United States and Western Europe can hardly afford to provide to their customers. Service price is a fundamental factor in evaluation of all and every service, and India’s IT consultants are well known for their very competitive pricing and first class service based on first hand experience with both large scale and niche projects in the field of software development, customization, and implementation.

Traditionally, India’s software developers and vendors have been a major force in the region of Asia/Pacific, which in turn resulted in a flourishing software consultancy industry that provides advisory services domestically and abroad. According to various reports, local market for software consulting services is set to grow markedly within the next decade, while a steadily increasing number of foreign companies outsource projects and services requiring software consulting coverage to India-based consultants. In fact, India is the leading world power in the field of software outsourcing service, mainly offshore software development and research and development services, but also software consulting covering all and every aspect of the multifaceted software development and implementation process.

The country competes with behemoths like China and Canada to attract foreign-based companies, but virtually all reports by market analysts position India as a leading world power in the sphere of offshore software consulting, along with the Philippines. The two countries jointly hold over 50 percent of the world market for outsourced software development and consultancy services, with India leading the pack by a marked margin.

This development is result of wisely planned government policy of investing into knowledge-based services and industries like software and hardware research and development, with cities like Mumbai, New Delhi, and Pune cited as world-leading destinations for software outsourcing and software consultancy services thanks to global connectivity, developed infrastructure, and availability of well-trained software professionals. Thus a software consulting firm in India, especially one positioned in the above mentioned R&D centers, can rely on underlying infrastructure similar to those in the West while enjoying significantly lower payroll expenditures, for example.

Software consultancies based in Europe and the United States have to deal with highly regulated domestic labor markets, strict legislation in the field of human resource protection, and traditionally higher remuneration packages within the IT industry, and all those factors combined result in loss of competitive advantage compared with India-based software consultants. In contrast, India’s software consultancies enjoy a liberal market, where a combination of relatively low wages in the IT sector and availability of highly educated professionals in the field creates unparalleled market growth potential. Even the brain drain of domestically educated IT professionals to companies and universities abroad does not harm noticeably India’s ability to provide unrivalled software consulting services in terms of quality to price ratio, which signals further steady development of those services in India.

Software development and consulting outsourcing is mutually advantageous process, in which the service provider gains access to technology and particular know-how it would not be allowed to access otherwise. Thus, India-based software consultants gradually gained experience in fields that were previously restricted to U.S.- and Europe-based companies only, which in turn gave a marked boost to their competitiveness in terms of possession and access to cutting edge technologies.

Finally, a software consulting firm in India can benefit from the country’s unique location in the very heart of Asia/Pacific region, making India a preferred place for hiring a software consultancy firm to deal with regional software and hardware developers and vendors.

Optimize Organization’s Performance through Automation of Portal Intranet Workflow

Intranet portals are widespread systems to manage various business applications and data used in day-to-day activities of a corporation, specifically designed to improve the overall performance of an enterprise through the means of different tools like portal intranet workflow. Workflows and intranet workflows in a corporate context consist of a number of steps aimed at improving the technical aspects of task performance, in addition to better organizing the overall process of job communication, collaboration, and completion of tasks. Thus, the corporate portal intranet workflow is an invaluable tool to automate various processes and procedures, while tracking the progress of a particular task, a project, or a set of projects.

Evidently, intranet workflow is where planned and actual performances of tasks meet, and where automated procedures can be applied in order to better the outcome of a particular task. Hence, an intranet portal serves as a primary hub for not only exchange of information and collaboration, but also as a tool to improve corporations’ efficiency, providing room for application of numerous automated procedures in the field of corporate reporting, scheduling, and many others.

Communication and interactions between both business software applications and users within an intranet portal is performed in a more secure way compared to open systems that allow third-party users to access the system. An intranet portal usually also provides access control functionality and user or group based security that prevents or allows access to particular intranet resources and data. Furthermore, a user or a group might be prevented from accessing outside networks, as well as to get automatic denial when attempting to get remote access to the system, while enabling system administrators to create strong hierarchical user trees.

Another dimension of intranet portals is their ability to utilize templates that automate particular tasks or even trigger actions depending on the state of a task or a project. For example, a template can be used to distribute mass-messages to groups or individual users when a certain event, like scheduled appointment, occurs. Other tools to manage workflow can also be incorporated into an intranet portal, enabling managers to keep close eye on internal work processes.

Workflow depends on data and information that is used within an enterprise as well as data and information coming from outside sources like contractors, clients, and suppliers. Therefore, an intranet portal is usually equipped with software modules to process, handle, and transfer such data in various formats that allow for interoperability between enterprises and within the company. Portal intranet workflow may comprise prices of information originating from different business applications thus creating a working environment that should cope with the challenge of various data formats, standards, and procedures. The automation of such processes can relieve employees of duties related to manual exchange and re-formatting of data and provide secure medium for inter-departmental communication and collaboration.

While many people think of portal intranet workflow mainly in terms of calendaring and scheduling optimization, a full-fledged intranet portal can feature modules that optimize and automate the work process across all departments and cover virtually every aspect of running a business. The functionality allowing for triggering scheduled and accidental actions is unparalleled in terms of organizing and optimizing performance, while providing early warnings and reminders caused by the occurrence of a particular event or lack of action.

Furthermore, the entire corporate paperwork can be regarded as an element of the portal intranet workflow and managed according to preset corporate policies and procedures. Overall, a reliable intranet portal provides unlimited opportunity to automate myriads of processes involved in the portal intranet workflow that would otherwise require manual actions, thus improving efficiency and boosting performance.

What Drives the Success of Web Portal Development in India?

Whether it is a personal or a corporate portal, a growing number of customers worldwide look for services related to web portal development in India to get first-class yet affordable product. Web portal development is still a rapidly growing business, with huge potential for further expansion, despite that the first web portals have emerged a few decades ago. The inevitable need to collect and present data from various sources at one site, to place offers and make trades online, to communicate with individuals and businesses gave birth to different types of web portals: from personal to corporate to governmental to tender portals.

Equipped with features like free or paid email services, stock quotes, news, and research tools, web portals are considered a major driver of the Internet’s progress as a whole, while organizations, both private and governmental, are eager to promote their own personalized web portals that might be public or not. Thus, fueled by excessive demand, web portal development evolved into a lucrative business, while the affordability of portal development services soared, especially quality services provided by reputable software developers and vendors. This undesired development, from customer’s point of view, had happened mainly because of the concentration of web portal development services in the West where market fundamentals presuppose higher costs of web and software development as well as higher payroll costs.

Gradually, this Western hegemony in the field of software development, including web development and portal development, has faded away, after new market players from Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America unveiled products and services featuring high quality and reasonable pricing. Today’s market for web portal development is much more customer friendly in terms of pricing, customization, implementation and support services available to customers as well as in terms of number of providers to choose from internationally. Moreover, the emergence of advanced online collaboration technologies has largely eliminated the obstacles preventing enterprises from adopting solutions developed abroad and installed or hosted internally through the means of remote assistance.

Web portal development in India is a relatively new phenomenon; nevertheless, the market is growing at tremendous pace, powered by rapidly expanding demand for outsourced software and web development services, mainly in the West. At present, even large multinationals outsource web portal development, implementation, and support to India-based vendors, looking for external expertise, optimization of costs and more affordable service. While the costs of web portal development in the Western hemisphere have plummeted markedly in the past decade, software developers in Asia/Pacific region are still unequaled in terms of price/quality ratio, giving them notable competitive advantage over rivals.

This is of particular interest to medium- and small-sized business looking for affordable solutions to design and implement an organizational web portal. Such an organizational web portal may feature advanced capabilities like online collaboration tools, workflow management, content management, as well as ability to connect to the system remotely and safely through a module designed to controls user access. In fact, those types of systems are widely adopted across virtually all industries and within enterprises of all sizes, which in turn means that India’s software developers can apply their skills in many different spheres where website portals are used.

The recent emergence of cloud computing as the next big thing raised questions whether the Cloud is to put an end to locally hosted and administered web portals, both public and private, while offering even greater opportunities for those involved in web portal development. As far as the cloud is considered a growingly safe environment, software developers and customers alike can take advantage of advanced third party software and hardware infrastructure to develop, host, manage, and administer web portals, which also greatly reduces the overall cost of running a public or a private web portal. Thus, web portal development in India is now trying to expand into the territory of cloud computing, where promising opportunities are hiding.