Everything started from outsourcing. Companies began to shift some part of their workload (everything but core business activities, like human resources, catering and security) to outside companies within national boundaries. Some time later businesses realized that because of great imbalance in global economy, they could cut down their costs by sending their outsourced work abroad, i.e. to a row of developing countries where the cost of labor is much cheaper than in post-industrial countries. That is how the idea of offshoring was born. First, low-skilled service jobs like telephone call centres, component assembly were shifted abroad; then businesses began to handle more complicated intellectual tasks over to other countries.
The arrival of the digital age has contributed to another notion in a business sphere - Offshoring 2.0. Since, digital communications have become more affordable, many partner offshoring companies have become able to do much more for their clients than before. “In the very near future, for small and medium size businesses, having partners in the Pacific Basin will no longer seem exotic, but the norm”, Research Director of the Economic Research Council Dan Lewis says.
If later, outsourcing companies were involved in all kinds of outsourcing, and used to take up any task that was offered to them, now they have become selective, or better say, they have become more specialized. So what differs Offshoring 2.0 from offshoring is narrow specialization. Today there is a number of offshoring companies, which handle only one particular type of tasks, i.e. bookkeeping, software development, web development, engineering, financial analysis etc. It has been estimated that up to 40 percent of currently outsourced jobs, could be next in a row to be sent offshore. Such professional classes as lawyers, accountants, medical practitioners, computer programmers and even financial analysts – can soon lose their jobs for the reason that their work will be outsourced to outside countries! There is something to think about…
Offshoring 2.0 is typical not only for the countries of the Pacific basin, as mentioned by Dan Lewis, but also for CEE (Central and Eastern Europe). Many of the firms in Belarus, Ukraine, and Bulgaria started creating companies that even though smaller than the end-to-end offshore companies, but are becoming quite large as specialized companies. Let’s take Moveyourweb Web Development IT Outsourcing Company as a vivid example of a modern, rapidly growing and professional Offshoring 2.0 company. We deal with only one IT branch, which is web development, including a variety of related services:
- web design;
- logo design and corporate identity design;
But no more than that. Being focused on only one branch of Information Technologies, the company gets a splendid opportunity to master certain IT skills and, thus, perform their job on a highly professional level. Rather than taking up everything without having profound knowledge and enough experience, having narrow specialization, we believe, is more advantageous to us and our clients.
Offshoring 2.0 is just starting to open up huge opportunities. This method of optimization of many foreign business processes keeps gaining popularity, and promises to become the greatest business paradigm of the XXI century.
Tags: offshore services, offshoring 2.0, outsourcing services, web development outsourcing services
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