An Overseas Development Center for a leading technology company
Calsoft Labs's Offshore Development Center enables a leading Global Telecom Equipment maker gain an edge in the enterprise data networking market.
Company
The Client is a leading global telecom equipment manufacturer that makes core network switches, routers and related enterprise networking products apart from traditionally telephony and wireless communications equipment.
Challenge
After the dot-com bust, telecom/networking equipment manufacturers were badly hit and the Client had to move fast in face of competition in order to retain its market share, while continuing to innovate and bringing to market new technologies and products. This required attaining higher efficiencies in terms of cost as well as productivity. Even though there were plenty of job seekers in the market, the lack of talent with specialized skills at affordable cost was making it a difficult scenario.
Solutions
Calsoft Labs started with addressing the immediate need for specialized skills in core networking technologies at the Client's Silicon Valley technology center. Calsoft Labs's pool of engineers with expertise in network management, routing, firewalls, VPN, IP storage, device drivers and network equipment testing, as well as specialized knowledge in various networking protocols and tools such as TCP/IP, OSFP, BGP, VRRP, SSL, IPSec, SNMP, IPv6, DHCP, RADIUS, AAA, Smartbits, Ixia, Tcl/tk, etc. were able to offer highly productive services that helped in meeting theimmediate goals.
Distributed Team Model
Subsequently, in order to attain higher efficiencies in cost, Calsoft Labs setup an Offshore Development Center in India exclusively for the Client staffed with highly skilled talent with the set of specific technology skills required for each of their product lines. The goal was to have the onsite team focus on new product development and the offshore team to assist the onsite team in new product development as well as in ongoing sustenance and regression and performance testing of the products.
Calsoft Labs was able to establish and make fully productive the Distributed Team Model within the first one year of engagement and since then there has been no looking back. Calsoft Labs's Distributed Team size for this Client engagement has grown to over 100 engineers and it is growing from strength to strength.
Offshore QA Labs
one of the key requirements for networking and telecom equipment software development is to have well equipped test labs to perform various tests such as simulation of large traffic volumes and automated script based performance and regression testing. Calsoft Labs setup exclusive dedicated test labs for the Client both onsite and offshore to meet this need and staffed the labs with test engineers with specific skills in the products and technologies required. The has enabled the client to not only move most of its QA work offshore, Calsoft Labs was so successful in this that the Client moved its existing offshore QA labs with other vendors to Calsoft Labs.
Results
The Client was able to retain and gain over its competitors in the enterprise networking marketplace by benefiting from the following factors:
- Achieved higher competitiveness in the market by reducing engineering costs by over 50%.
- Able to achieve faster time-to-market for new technologies and products as the core engineering team was able to focus on new products while the remote teams took care of subsequent releases of products.
- Able to add specialized engineering talent at a much shorter time-frame from Calsoft Labs's global talent pool.
- Continuing to attain even more efficiencies through fully outsourcing product lines.
Benefits
The ODC model provides many advantages to the customer. Key benefits are
- Lower cost of development, sustenance and quality assurance.
- Augmenting the engineering team with scarce talent.
- Ability to meet difficult time-to-market requirements.
- Reduced risks- the ODC team can be ramped down at short notice.
- More control over the projects, unlike a totally outsourced execution.