As policy makers and economists struggle to come up with long-term plans to combat crises, businesses need immediate and effective solutions to the operational problems they face on a daily basis, some of which are:

• Cash crunch
• Expensive and mostly unavailable human resources
• Aging of the population of senior cadres of technology experts, due to retirement
• Difficulty scaling up, down due to immigration laws, union politics, corporate cultural attitudes
• Among other weak points

In today’s interconnected world, businesses that do not operate from the Internet or desktop computers are at a distinct disadvantage.

The offshore software development company is at the forefront of the new wave of solutions that address these problems, which are most acutely felt in the West. Professional research groups such as Gartner point to offshore software development in India as a growth hub for offshore software companies and product development companies. Other centers include Ireland, Canada and Israel and, to some extent, South Africa and Brazil.

The need for an offshore software development company is felt primarily by Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) companies, software-enabled companies, and non-IT companies. ISVs are established entrepreneurs or companies whose business is to spot a market opportunity for software and to develop and market it. SAAS companies are companies like salesforce.com, whose software powers sales teams around the world. Software-enabled companies are those whose business is enabled, especially by web-based software such as travel and hospitality portals. And there are non-IT companies whose offerings include some form of custom software as a value-added service to their customers.

Current estimates put the market opportunity for offshore software development companies at US$350 billion and growing.

Services provided by a typical product development company in India include but are not limited to:

• New product development
• Product improvement, patches
• Product migration, scalability
• Support
• Product integration
• Testing and QA of products
• Maintenance of existing products

This article is contributed by BrickRed Technologies, headquartered in a state-of-the-art offshore development center in a Tier I offshoring city, Noida, Delhi. Every day, some of the world’s hardest-working organizations rely on our software and engineering skills to safely and reliably serve their customers. With offices in the US, UK, and Dubai, BrickRed provides services for the end-to-end development of commercial-grade software products and applications for startups, established and emerging technology companies, and IT-enabled organizations. Our work has been endorsed by leading industry experts: The Black Book of Outsourcing, Red Herring Asia, Deloitte Fast 500 and Microsoft, among them.