The Business Case for Outsourcing Turnkey Development Services
“Alone, we can do so little, together we can do so much”
– Hellen Keller
Skype, Klout, GitHub, Basecamp, MySQL are just a few examples of start-ups that successfully outsourced their software development and grew to become billion-dollar organizations. In recent years, many early-stage companies are exploring turnkey development services to fast-track their development timelines and ensure they go-to market faster. Not just that, larger and more established companies are also looking at turnkey development as an option to fast-track their digital transformation needs.
With technological advancements and the rise of digitization, the modern-day workplace is increasingly interconnected. Couple these new emerging markets and the rise of a skilled workforce and the case for companies looking for turnkey software development becomes a natural choice, which has prompted this trend in recent years. While the challenges of finding a reliable partner or effectively managing timelines are always there, startups are increasingly looking to adopt turnkey development services as their preferred choice for going to market faster with their technology products.
Through this blog, we would explore why does outsourcing turnkey development services make sense, and can your organization go the same way? More importantly, this blog also attempts to understand the business case for outsourcing turnkey development services to help you make an educated decision on it is something that your startup could look to undertake.
But before we get there, let's understand what turnkey development services are and why are they increasingly gaining popularity in recent years.
What are Turnkey development services?
Turnkey Software Development produces a software product that is designed, supplied, built, or installed fully complete and ready to operate. Typically, it is a pre-built solution that can be easily incorporated into any existing business process. The finished product has a wide functionality that boosts your business, provides you with the codebase, and eliminates the potential risks of
Turnkey software can help make your workflows more efficient, reduce project lead times, and increase team productivity. In addition, a ready-made solution is much cheaper and easier to implement, so it is great for companies with a limited budget. Finally, turnkey custom development is a good choice for companies that do not have their own development team or the time to build their own software.
For example, outsourcing for turnkey development services is the best option for companies that do not specialize in developing software applications. Consider medical institutions - typically, hospitals do not have the resources and time to create their own platform with the complex functionality for interacting with patients. In this case, such a solution initially doesn’t have the specific functions that hospitals need, but it can easily be customized to meet all product owner’s requirements.
Outlining the business case for outsourcing Turnkey Development Services
Lower development costs
Hiring a team of technology experts can be an expensive proposition, which is just a portion of the costs. Organizations also must spend some time investing in the right infrastructure, building processes and delivery methodologies, and training.
By outsourcing, an organization can almost reduce its development cost by half since they do not need to incur any of these expenses. Even in rank-and-file developers, cost advantages can accrue. Labour arbitrage has traditionally been one of the accepted advantages of outsourcing. Research from Aberdeen Group shows that outsourcing software development activities cost approximately “30- 65% less than in-house development initiatives.”
While being face to face with your developers seems good, with the advent of the pandemic affecting in-office attendance, it might no longer be a necessity. With technology evolving at the pace, it is, coordinating with teams has become convenient. Having geographically distributed software teams is now par for the course anyway. Scrums, meetings to discuss product features, design, or other inquiries, can easily be done using collaboration tools or video conferencing. This is more important with startups, who have limited access to human and financial resources and might not be able to afford expensive in-house technology application development.
Access to technology experts
With an acute skills shortage of technical talent, it is getting increasingly difficult to hire experts for the unique requirements of the product pipeline. Perhaps among of the greatest advantages of outsourcing for turnkey software development is the kind of access they can gain to an array of technology experts. Working with an established outsourcing organization gives you access to highly skilled technology experts whose contribution would help in developing a stronger, feature-rich, and robust software product. These experts can also help in identifying ways to make the product better and assess if the product can be developed in other cost-effective ways. The advantage here is that the technology expert can be brought in for a specified period to perform a particular task without any long-term commitment and the associated costs.
This could be critical for a startup – traction of their product would depend on how well the software has been made. A reliable customer-centric offering can only be made by a skilled team of technical professionals. It’s by no means certain that a startup will be able to find, hire, and retain such top talent – the founders apart, of course. This is equally important for established companies looking to advance their digital transformation requirements and lack of access to quality technical experts to hamper their goals, which could be avoided by outsourcing for turnkey development services.
Reducing technical debt and improved business agility
As the demand for developing tech applications mounts, most IT teams that are already strapped for time don’t really have an effective way to handle it. What ends up happening is that the requests are placed on a backlog tracker and are attended to as and when they could be. A potential area where outsourcing for turnkey development services might impact is reducing the number of IT application requests or the pending technical debt by sharing the development load with a reliable outsourced partner.
This is equally true for startups. The reality is that the software product development environment is in a constant state of flux. The ‘it’ technology of yesterday could be no longer viable for the product that the startup is trying to create. Platform demands keep changing, customer expectations are evolving with time, and development methodologies transform. Start-ups doing product development in-house may get dragged into the many operational aspects of the development and the other aspects of building the business such as identifying markets, business opportunities, or revenue sources can get lost.
Scaling & ramping down technical teams
In-house development teams are always the first preference and companies, and entrepreneurs often get stuck to the idea of ‘owning’ the technology sprints and delivery. This idea suddenly starts looking less attractive when companies need to either scale up or ramp down teams to accommodate the uncertain needs of the business environment. Hiring trained developers is not easy and is time-consuming and overstaffing is costly.
Outsourcing for turnkey development services gives companies the flexibility to add resources or reduce them according to the speed of development, project demands, and time-to-market amongst other considerations. This has a huge impact on the cost considerations of managing technology teams and often makes the business case for outsourcing favorable.
Avoiding risk and chaos
Companies looking to go to market faster or looking to progress with their digital transformation goals significantly can avoid all the chaos and risks software application development brings with itself by outsourcing turnkey development services. Application development outsourcing vastly reduces the risks and stressful dynamics involved in any type of development project. Many responsibilities that would normally be on you (such as keeping track of the progress, distributing tasks, and ensuring that all deadlines are met) are taken on by the project manager of the outsource team. That way, instead of constantly worrying about possible obstacles and complications that might arise, you can focus on more interesting or important tasks.
By outsourcing turnkey development services, you would ensure that skilled technology specialists are involved with every part of development: the analysis of business processes, coding, implementation, testing, and system maintenance. The only things required from you as a client are consistent comprehensive interaction and assistance to ensure that the projects meet the desired quality objectives.
Xamun: Your Strategic Partner for Outsourcing Turnkey Development Services
Our team at Xamun ensures that we deliver the best business case for outsourcing turnkey development services by taking a modern approach to software building. Companies can have fully functional, high-quality Web, iOS, and/or Android apps at record speeds with Xamun with well documented and human-readable source code output with the company taking complete ownership of the resulting IP.
The value proposition which Xamun looks to provide include:
70% faster app build- Launching as soon as possible is critical for any business. Get faster time to market compared to building everything from scratch
30% cheaper than outsourcing- Not all software projects need hiring an outsourced team. Have your app built at a lower cost but with the same quality!
Technical expertise- The clients leverage 20+ years of experience in software product engineering, building global, financial, and B2B apps
Reach out to one of our Go-Digital Evangelists HERE to understand how outsourcing turnkey development services to a reliable partner like Xamun might just be the differentiating factor that would catapult your organization to a faster go-to-market and superior business results.