Offshore development for SMBs
Big companies are often criticized for outsourcing development to India, Eastern Europe and other offshore locations. But would the howls of protest be muted if smaller companies could do the same? Losing your job to offshore coders is one thing. Getting a better job supervising a project that uses that same offshore labor is something else.
Of course, small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) have always been able to access offshore contract labor"[SMBs] don’t have the time, they don’t have the talent" through services such as Elance. That's fine — sometimes — for one-off requirements that are easily and clearly specified. But such arrangements don't allow the kind of close working relationships and oversight that are required by more complex projects or for ongoing development. Costs start to escalate when you start to build in the personal contact and infrastructure that's needed in these closer working arrangements.
That's why I was fascinated last summer to learn of a new service being launched by distributed software development specialist CollabNet. The company is one of the best-known and yet least-noticed of leading on-demand vendors, with software that powers a parade of prestigious developer communities, including Sun's java.net and OpenOffice.org, Bea's dev2dev and others. Its CTO Brian Behlendorf is a leading light of the open-source world, having been instrumental in the creation of the Apache Web Server Project.
And yet despite the high profile these activities give the company among developers, very few people realize that most of its customers use CollabNet's development lifecycle applications as a service rather than installed in-house.
Perhaps it's because CollabNet's customer base consists almost exclusively of large enterprises, which aren't supposed to be big fans of hosted on-demand applications. They make an exception in the case of CollabNet because it specializes in catering for highly distributed development teams, most of which would be accessing the application remotely even if it were hosted in-house — so they may as well use an external provider.
Now CollabNet has extended its offering to reach out to SMBs too, with a Team Edition designed to serve project teams of between five and fifty developers. It has the same feature set as the enterprise product, except for limits on support and customization. The price is $65 per developer per month, with a minimum of five users, compared to $175 per developer per month for the enterprise edition.
That price is easily recouped by using offshore developers as part of the team, which is why I led on the offshore opportunity. But of course there are many other reasons why SMBs might want to manage a distributed development team — perhaps to collaborate with other companies or customers, or to allow developers to work from home instead of incurring extra office costs. The application also enforces useful working practices such as a central repository, version control, and fine-grained access and authorization controls.
The competitive landscape for SMBs is even more demanding than it is for larger companies, which is why it's great to see on-demand vendors like CollabNet coming out with offerings that help level the playing field for the smaller guys. CollabNet's VP of business development, Chris Clabaugh, is no stranger to the SMB market, having previously worked with systems integrators and solution providers at ASP infrastructure provider Allegrix, which later became part of Progress Software, where he developed its ASP partner program. If anything, the pressures for midmarket companies are tougher, he told me: "They don't have the time, they don't have the talent, but they've gotta do this." He believes Team Edition will help a significant number of them do it better.