A growing number of marketers and corporate executives are looking onshore for their business app and mobile solutions needs, signifying a reversing trend that will see a rise in project opportunities for local developers.

It’s a trend that Buuna has identified over the course of the past 18 months. More marketing managers and corporate executives are starting to recognise the benefits of getting development done locally. Previous to this, the trend a few years ago was to go low cost and send all development offshore.

Previous experience and the time associated with the offshoring of development projects as two of the major reasons for the trend reversal.

About 80% of prospective clients that approach us have had experience with offshored projects, which for most have not been overly positive experiences when the job failed to come back as expected.

For Australian companies, India has undoubtedly become the country of choice when sourcing app development offshore. With an average 4.5 hour difference, Lin says time is always an issue, as the only time to work together is an afternoon overlap. The result can be slow, unresponsive turnaround times that blow out a project’s timeline and offset many original cost savings.

For Buuna clients, the benefits of having their development needs catered for locally are obvious. If they need to check on a project’s progress, they can drop by the Buuna office and take a look, or pick up the phone to discus a change directly with their developer and be confident that action is taken immediately. In the end you have a smoother, more stable and secure product.

Other factors to take into account are the end marketing goals of your company. Corporate and enterprise apps need to have a strong strategic purpose behind them in order to meet these goals. The end product might look the same, yet surface similarities can mask subtle differences and misgivings in user experience and results. 

To meet these goals, certain geographic and cultural backgrounds of the audience you are marketing to must be clearly understood by everyone in the development team.

Beyond basic communication difficulties and language breakdowns common with offshoring, it’s the lack of an inherent understanding of the finer cultural nuances of who the product is aimed at that cause its ultimate failure.