Local Companies Act As Ambassadors For Offshoring
Washington Business Journal (September 15th, 2008)
David Yaskin, chief executive officer of Arlington-based Starfish Retention Solutions Inc., has found he could hire Argentineans of comparable quality to U.S. developers and pay them about half of his estimated rate of $120 an hour here.
"When you look at the resumes of the labor, they're working [with] GE, IBM, Motorola; it felt like this could be a resume of someone in Texas," said Yaskin, whose startup makes tutoring and mentoring software.
Latin America has emerged in recent years as the next big contender to compete with India as an outsourcing hot spot. Recent free trade agreements, similar time zones and an inexpensive, but sophisticated, technology labor force are all mentioned as reasons for the trend.
Starfish, which spun off from D.C.-based Blackboard Inc. last October and got a capital injection of more than $3 million from Bethesda-based Novak Biddle Venture Partners in July, has been working with a team of four developers through Reston-based LeverPoint LLC's Argentinean division LeverCube.
As a result, Yaskin said, Starfish has been able to produce its first two products in about seven months, a pace he said the company could not have realized elsewhere.
"It was really the kind of the thing where we were coming up with [the products] in a really interactive process, which is hard to do with people eight hours away," Yaskin said.
That interaction is a big reason the region has become more attractive of late. Developers there have adopted the practice of "agile development" techniques, which refer to a more iterative and collaborative development processes that puts an emphasis on combining both technical and business perspectives.
Besides Starfish's time savings, the company also recognized labor efficiencies. Argentina's talent pool is viewed as more technically and linguistically advanced than that of other regions, which gives its workers some leverage to win the best possible salaries, resulting in some labor turnover issues.
Yaskin said Starfish is hiring a team of U.S. developers and also is considering outsourcing opportunities in Eastern Europe, in case employee retention issues in Argentina crop up down the road.
"As a business you want to have the majority of the development team be your own employees, especially when it's time to exit," Yaskin said.
About LeverPoint:
LeverPoint provides software product development and testing outsourcing to software firms and software-enabled enterprises worldwide using our unique right-shore, dedicated partnership model. With this model LeverPoint builds highly efficient, win-win client-partnerships with an optimized mix of team members from the client's internal resources and LeverPoint's centers in the US and around the globe. These teams operate as virtually one team and are comprised of the full range of skills needed to more quickly and cost-effectively bring higher quality software products from vision to market including user interface and requirements definition to software architecture, development and the myriad forms of software testing.
The company is headquartered outside Washington, DC with US offices in Boston, New York and in the UK in London. Our global delivery centers are located in India, Argentina and Eastern Europe.
For more information, please contact:
Lawrence Roe
Larry.roe@leverpointinc.com
LeverPoint, LLC
11417 Sunset Hills Road, Suite 215
Reston, VA 20190
703-435-6365/888-LeverUp