How to Scale A Business With Custom Technology

IT outsourcing has become a powerful instrument, that can help to scale a business, worldwide.

Modern custom software development companies offer a wide range of various software development services, that cover all possible industries, starting with basic management systems for Healthcare and ending with innovative FinTech solutions like smart contacts, or artificial intelligence.

One of the most well-known advantages of team extension services is that they are great for most modern business models, regardless of their scale and budget, complexity of tasks, or technology specifics. However, despite all the potential benefits of outsourcing software development to Eastern Europe, or other countries, there are still many questions worth answering before making your final decision.

For instance, How does custom management software help or harm your business operations? And how to choose a custom software development company?

Therefore, to make a more informed decision on what to choose in certain circumstances, let’s examine each of the foregoing dilemmas, and try to answer these questions first.

Custom Solution vs SaaS Generic Software

What is custom management software and how does it differ from the rest of the development approaches?

As the name implies, custom software development services aim to provide clients with instruments, that meet their expectations and project requirements. Usually, it also includes the development of certain demanded features of functional options. Alternatively, such custom solutions might be based on particular programming languages, or serve certain project goals.

To cut a long story short, custom software development companies propose software development as a service, which creates unique software.

On the other hand, ready-made software, distributed as SaaS tools are predefined applications or services. They have a list of features, which will hardly change. In other words, choosing custom management software as a service is a process of buying a ready-made app to increase the technological advancement of their project, or to integrate certain functionalities like collaboration tools, etc.

When to Choose a Custom Software Development Partner?

You can try such a collaboration model in almost any circumstance. Yet, there are a few major advantages and most suitable scenarios when you might benefit from software development extension or dedicated team cooperation.

If you need project management tools during your development, but it has nothing in common with your main business goal, i.e. you are not developing such software, it is easier and cheaper to simply adopt one of the ready-made applications like Jira, Asana, Slack, etc.

However, when it comes to extending the functionality of your product, it is better to consider a custom management software development process. To do so, you can hire a team extension developer.  Alternatively, try out a dedicated software development team. Your choice will depend on your requirements and the complexity of the tasks.

In other words, when you need to scale a business or integrate new functionality – hiring a dedicated development team is your choice. Alternatively, if need just extra tools and software to manage business operations like project management applications, or software for business analysis, as well as any other technologies, which are not related to the functionality of your personal software product – you might benefit more from SaaS integrations.

Additionally, some core technologies, that are vital for the product, yet very complex to develop and maintain, you might consider combining both approaches. For instance, hiring remote developers, familiar with certain niche-specific software industries like cloud software development and integration, or financial resources management applications.

To cut a long story short, here is the list of development tasks. These are ideal for the custom software development process and hiring a dedicated development team:

• You need niche-experienced developers, familiar with certain complex software solutions, worth adapting
• Your business is scaling, and you need an extended team to cover all the working aspects.
• You lack expertise in a certain technology or industry, and looking for experts for advice, or to fill skill gaps and take care of specific tasks

Eventually, let’s have a few words on how to scale a business with the use of custom software development teams.

How Custom Software Helps to Scale Business

Scaling a business always requires new innovative solutions. Frankly, when you scale a business, you will need new functionality and code-based technologies. Even if you aim at improving customer experience and increasing your target audience.

It may seem, that using different marketing strategies and simply optimizing the existing product functionality is enough to see the results.

Nevertheless, if you want to truly scale a business, you will also need new custom solutions. The reason for this is simple: the bigger you become – the bigger your audience expectation is. Many business owners are satisfied with their results in their “weight category”, a niche, they are occupying. Any business analyst will tell you, that scaling brings new requirements and increases competition level. So, you will need new features and software to manage business operations under the hood, which will be unique or better than the ones, proposed by the competitors.

The easiest way to deliver them – find reliable partners, who can provide you with excellent IT outsourcing. Such potential software development partners with knowledge and specialized skills will cover most future issues.

For example, both dedicated team model and team extension services will bring the required skill sets, needed for digital transformation and for achieving a competitive edge in new niches. These can be technical skills in certain programming languages and other technologies, or just a better understanding of the industry insights and specifics, commercial requirements, etc.

Other Benefits of Custom Software Development Services

One of the most important advantages of custom software development projects is that they are more flexible and suitable for emerging innovations.

For instance, just a few years ago, artificial intelligence was extremely complex and limited technology, mainly distributed by AI-oriented custom enterprise software development companies. Yet, after the boom of artificial intelligence, with the emergence of ChatGPT and its alternatives, more and more companies are trying to integrate such software as a feature.

In most cases, these are custom software projects. Even if they are based on SaaS or API of third-party AI solutions. Their vanilla versions are far from providing the required services without extra code-based improvements.

Yet, custom software development companies usually propose two different services: dedicated teams and team extensions. At this point, you will face new challenges:

1. choosing between hiring a dedicated development team or an individual app developer for hire
2. choosing between nearshore and offshore app developers for hire

Therefore, let’s briefly examine both options and discuss all the pros and cons of each possible choice and how to choose a custom software development company.

Extended Software Development Team

An extended team is a great choice for cases when business is short-handed or requires niche-experienced developers. Such an approach helps to extend the current house team with 1-2 software developers and cover new maintenance and development tasks.

It is a cost-efficient approach, that gives you software engineers with specialized skills very fast. Such developers are also more flexible and can adjust to new conditions in no time.

However, team extensions do not work in the short run. It is suited for mid or long-term projects. It also takes some time for knowledge sharing.

Hiring a Dedicated Development Team

This is similar to the regular house development team.

To rephrase it, these are full-fledged software development teams, that consist of software engineers, DevOps specialists, quality assurance team members, project managers, and other staff. The main difference between a dedicated team and an in-house one is that dedicated teams are located elsewhere, being outsourced. It can be either a nearshore or offshore team of developers, depending on your preferences.

Hiring a dedicated development team is a great solution for startups or for companies, that are scaling very fast and require more than a few software engineers to deal with complex tasks.

Nearshore vs Offshore Developers For Hire

Team extension model also varies, depending on the region, developers come from. To make it simple, there are 3 main types:

• Onshore is located in your country
• Nearshore is from one of the closest countries
• Offshore is from far away

Onshore is used as the most traditional hiring approach for the in-house team. While the other two are great for team extension services. Nearshore is more expensive, yet gives you the ideal candidate when you lack employees with certain skills or expertise.

Offshore is the cheapest solution for team extension. This also makes it possible to choose the most unique and specific niche-experienced developer on the global market. Yet, don’t forget about the cultural differences, as well as the differences in time zones.

Source: Incora.software, I, the author, confirm that I have the right to use the images in this article.