Deborah Nazareth (UK PR Manager) with input from other Future Processing employees.

On Thursday last week I attended the Deloitte Technology EMEA Fast 500 Awards and Dinner in London and was delighted to see Future Processing come in at number 249 in the rankings.  It was a great evening with good food and drink, interesting speakers and the chance to meet people from other technology companies.

During the evening, one of the speakers remarking on the rich seam of innovation in the EMEA technology industry as demonstrated by the 500 finalists, almost seemed surprised by this.

I was a bit taken aback by their tone of voice. True the top – read largest – technology companies are not from Europe or from Middle East and African countries but so much European technology is sold to US companies and goes on to be part of the biggest tech brands.

What’s more, everyone I met that evening was super-passionate about their business, whether they were owners, founders or employees. Like quality for Future Processing, they all had something they were really committed to that makes the difference for their business. It is that commitment and passion to stand out from the crowd that leads to innovation and subsequently on to growth.

For customers, this passion is something to really look out for – the resulting innovation and growth brings positive outcomes for them too. For example in terms of offshore software development it can lead to a determination to make new development methods, like SCRUM, work, over distances, to improve the development cycle.

So congratulations to all the Fast 500 finalists and in particular the top 5. Entrepreneurs across EMEA, let’s show the big boys what we’re made of.

CIO in the US recently published an article on innovation from offshore providers. It raises many of the points that were discussed at the NOA’s Innovation Day earlier this year:

Innovation is important to both customer and provider, but both have different interpretations of the term – customers are more focused on business-related innovation while outsourcers are more interested in the development process or technical innovation.  Larger outsourcers are trying to capitalise on this desire for innovation, but access to these services costs the customer more and requires additional resource from their team too, which puts off some customers. (more…)

Jakub Nalepa, a Polish software engineer at Future Processing, achieved the best result in the prestigious international competition for algorithmicists organised by the renowned Norwegian SINTEF project in 2011. Nalepa improved the previous record for a single instance of benchmarking problems by 30% – a considerable margin in this discipline. (more…)

I recently read an article on the US website CIO about IT outsourcers offering themselves as service integrators – essentially having one supplier co-ordinating or managing all the others on behalf of the customer. It seems that large IT services companies, like Cap, Accenture and Infosys are trying to get a piece of this action.

Interestingly we too were asked by one of our current customers to help with the management of another supplier based in Ukraine. The cultural and geographical proximity of Poland and Ukraine, coupled with the limited level of English language skills at their other supplier, made this an attractive position to our customer.

I, on the other hand, have my doubts about the model. I feel that for companies without many outsourced suppliers it adds yet another layer to the communication chain. And I think it increases the level of ‘inter-supplier office politics.’ The firms being ‘managed’ by the service integrator are unlikely to be happy with the arrangement. They may well wonder why another company is deemed better than them. Does their unhappiness matter? Yes, if they are waiting or possibly hoping for the service integrator to trip up. Equally the service integrator may be ultimately trying to win business away from the suppliers it manages.

I am also unsure about the real benefit to the customer. This model makes more sense if the customer does not understand offshoring and has no-one to do it internally. But I doubt this scenario is really possible in companies pursuing a multi-sourcing strategy. Surely, these companies must know what outsourcing is all about as they have built their supplier network, probably over a long period of time. In most instances, I can’t see the real value of this model, I’m afraid.

However, rather than being a service integrator, I think software development outsourcers can offer more value as systems integrators– companies that deliver a business solution to a customer possibly may use various on and off-shore suppliers to deliver different parts of the solution. It means taking overall responsibility for a project and its business targets, but is nothing new.  The prime and subcontractor model has been around for years.

At the end of September analyst firm Gartner published a paper outlining 10 steps to reduce IT costs by 25%. All the steps in the guide are good ways to cut costs, particularly at a time when IT budgets are under pressure again.

But what jumped out at me, was how little importance was given to outsourcing in the list of steps.  Multi-sourcing was mentioned as number 10: (more…)

A couple of days ago, a white paper on outsourcing software testing dropped into my inbox.  I was interested to read it, because we do offer a ‘QA only’ service – although most of our clients choose to use Future Processing for software development as well as testing. (more…)

At the National Outsourcing Association’s recent Offshoring Day, one of the presenters posed the question whether Agile development methods are really suitable for offshore software development. (more…)

Author: Deborah Nazareth (UK PR Manager) with input from other Future Processing employees.

I attended the National Outsourcing Association’s Offshoring Day in London last week.  Reading the agenda I was rather sceptical about how useful it would be for Future Processing, but actually there were several interesting speakers from end-user, advisory and supplier organisations and while it covered all types of outsourcing, there was plenty of content pertinent to offshore development. 

The day was chaired by Michael Stock, the NOA board member for offshoring.  In his opening remarks he said something along the lines of: these are the most interesting times that the industry has seen. The recession coupled with new technologies like cloud computing mean that it is hard to predict even the short-term operating environment. This sentiment was echoed by the second speaker, Nivedita Krishnamurthy, who said that she hasn’t seen so much change and such rapid change as the industry is experiencing now. As well as cloud computing she identified agile development as a key factor in bringing about this change.

I was not sure I completely agreed with their comments on change. These are definitely interesting times for the industry, but the most interesting? Are we witnessing such great change and is there really such unpredictability?

Being no expert,  I have drawn on collective wisdom and spoken to my colleagues about this. Based on what I see at Future Processing, the recession hasn’t really lead to unpredictability. We have seen growth and the Future Processing team is sure we will continue to see this, whether Europe ends up experiencing a double dip or not.

Jarosław Czaja, our CEO, made a very good point regarding change: technology is in continual iteration and the same thing can be said about software development methods. As an industry offshore development is used to, dare I say, even expects change. In fact, from my software developer colleagues’ point of view, cloud computing and agile methods, are in many ways, simply new environments. Jarosław would expect  that as good software engineers they are not only able to learn them but generally embrace the challenge of something new.

I discussed this further with my colleagues. It seems to us at Future Processing that the continuous evolution of tools and technologies is an integral part of the software industry. And while the introduction of cloud computing has certainly made waves in the industry it is not the first technology to do so. One of the best examples came from Jaroslaw – the transition from mainframes to PCs. Whether the expansion of cloud computing will eventually have similar effects is yet to be seen. Similarly Agile has lead to a significant change in the delivery of software products. However development methods have always evolved and continue to do so. To us Agile feels less like a sudden change and more like a gradual evolution.

So, in our collective experience, these are interesting times be involved in the industry and we are seeing lots of change, but this isn’t anything new, rather we are just continuing  to move along the maturity curve.

Author: Deborah Nazareth (UK PR Manager) with input from other Future Processing employees.

Recently I set up a talent enhancement programme called FP Academy. It provides high-quality, comprehensive ongoing professional development for employees. Among other things, our software developers can update their programming language skills, try out new open source initiatives and learn new team-working techniques.

But it is not just for developers, it is for all staff. And it is not just for staff, it is also for students studying computer science and engineering. They will get a taste of what the IT industry really is like.

Why you might ask would an offshore software development company create a training scheme for students across Poland.

Well, for me at any rate, the answer is simple.  The Polish IT outsourcing market is growing rapidly and I expect it will continue to grow for several years. This means the whole industry needs to attract more talent. However this requirement needs to be balanced with the fact that the Polish outsourcing industry’s reputation is based on quality. We cannot lose sight of this as we grow. Therefore ensuring  new talent coming into the industry understands what is required of them, understands how software houses and outsourcing operations work and have more than just a basic level of skills is vital.

When I started my first job as a developer in a software firm, I had a real shock. I thought I was a pretty good – after all I had created lots of programmes in my spare time. Of course I wasn’t as great as I thought and had lots to learn. I hope the FP Academy will mean that working in IT is less of a shock for today’s students and that they have less to learn when they start.

In Poland, IT industry has been developing strongly in the past twelve months:  According to IDC it saw 7% growth on the previous year. Outsourcing has been doing particularly well. In 2010 it made up 17% of the overall IT market (IDC, Outsourcing Magazine 6/2010). Proving this, we at Future Processing have doubled our headcount and gained many new customers. (more…)