InfoWorld columnist Ephraim Schwartz tells a different tale on offshoring in his latest column, “Bringing software development back in-house.” He shares why a Menlo Park, CA-based CRM company — Kana Software — decided to reverse course and bring development back in-house, after three years of working with programmers in India and China.
The bottom line, if you don’t have time for the full story: New CEO Mike Fields discovered that “every four or five offshore engineers, there was someone stateside whose responsibility was to manage that group and insure they were doing what the company wanted.” The company was top-heavy. Plus, it didn’t have the cohesion among designers, architects and coders that he thought it should. And, he was uncomfortable with intellectual property issues. Overall, the “associative costs” were too high.
