Outsourcing is a growing trend. You might be surprised that it’s not limited to the IT sector but is also happening in industries like HR, where the market is expected to reach about $20 billion by the end of 2023. This is not to say that some people raise their eyebrows or wrinkle their noses when they hear about “outsourced development.” In general, not everyone feels comfortable assigning work to contractors. It may also cause some people to feel really uneasy. Of course, having a team of in-house developers has some advantages. The problem is that not everyone can afford (senior) developers, especially at the start of their business.
Furthermore, not many companies want to invest in full-time developer hiring before they have a steady stream of new client work coming in. That’s true — IT outsourcing costs are well-balanced and won’t eat a big part of your project budget. This puts you in a very annoying “chicken and egg” situation where you need the expertise but cannot afford to hire someone to have it. That’s one area where outsourcing is just a perfect match! Let’s take a look at some of the prominent examples of big and famous companies built leveraging remote developers.
#1 — Expensify
Expensify was founded in 2008 with one objective: to assist people by providing a platform for effortlessly collecting expenses and keeping track of receipts and transactions. Expensify is now a corporation with over 130 employees, is publicly traded, generates over $169 million in sales per year, and serves over 60,000 businesses. However, developing such solutions demands a lot of expertise and effort: Expensify collaborated with a multinational software house to build its back-end technologies. This allowed them to concentrate on front-end development while focusing their in-house resources on business growth.
#2 — GitHub
GitHub is one of the most well-known communities that programmers use and engage with. It was founded in 2008 as an outsourced development consultancy by Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Tom Preston-Werner as a mechanism to host, document, update, and share private code. In reality, Tom met Scott Chacon, a huge authority on Git, an Open Source distributed version control system, by attending numerous local Ruby on Rails events in San Francisco. GitHub, which began as a side project and relied on outsourced development, is today utilized by 100 million developers worldwide.
#3 — Google
As one of the top corporations known for caring about its internal culture and employees, listing Google here may appear to be a mistake. The reality, however, is that the Mountain View, California-based computer giant has been working with outsourced labor across many types of tasks for years, with contractors even outnumbering the actual number of employees. Google already had 120,000+ outsourced employees by 2019, whether they were IT specialists, developers, or various other roles. Google is a prominent proponent of outsourcing work to manage the numerous projects it is constantly deploying and working on.
#4 — Microsoft
Microsoft has evolved to become a household name around the world, with an annual revenue of more than $198 billion. Even at that scale, however, outsourcing is an important component of Microsoft’s operations: a wide range of its tasks are performed by many organizations throughout the world. This includes various fundamental operations for the organization, such as IT support and finance, accounting, and procurement services. Although the corporation has around 220,000 in-house specialists, it also employs an equal number of workers on an outsourced basis to keep things operating smoothly.
#5 — Skype
During the early 2000s, Skype was one of the most disruptive tools and technologies. Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis’s idea would not have been a reality if they hadn’t outsourced the app’s back-end development to three Estonian engineers named Ahti Heinla, Jaan Tallinn, and Priit Kasesalu. This team had previously worked together on another product that used comparable peer-to-peer technology for music sharing: Kazaa, a peer-to-peer software that many of us would remember.
Skype was able to not only join the market but also become a widely used tool among organizations of all sizes thanks to its outsourcing development strategy. Skype became a part of Microsoft in 2011 when it was purchased for $8.5 billion.
Use Outsourcing to Help Your Business Grow
What’s the point of this? In a word, leveraging outsourcing can actually benefit your organization. Outsourcing a part of your routine tasks or even a part of your site development might be advantageous because it is budget-friendly, time-efficient, and allows for immediate access to skilled and specialized service providers.
