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Ambir partners with Indian software developer Rebecca Penty
After long espousing the virtues of doing business globally, IT consulting firm Ambir is now partnering with an Indian software developer to offer Atlantic Canadian companies the scalability, technical expertise and cost savings associated with offshoring in the Asian country. Ambir's local involvement in projects is being pitched as a way to maintain good communication with India. The opportunity Ambir is providing with India's Cabot Technology Solutions Pvt Ltd. - announced Monday - is being painted as both nearshore and offshore: Ambir, as project manager, will liaise with clients here and the software will get built by Cabot in India. For Ambir, which has offices in Saint John, Fredericton, Moncton and Halifax, the program dubbed Bridging the Gap to India is meant to add to existing business. "It provides an opportunity to augment or add value to what we do, should clients have a need for scale fairly quickly that can't otherwise be met locally," said Ambir CEO Ian Cavanagh. The executive noted that along with India's recognized larger pool of available IT workers to tackle projects quickly comes potentially greater expertise. "iPad development, which is a fairly new area of software development, may be more readily available in places such as this," Cavanagh said. The program will target software development across a variety of other technology platforms, including JAVA, iPhone, ASP.NET and Flash, to name a few. Cavanagh said that depending on the size and specifications of a project, clients could save between 20-40 per cent on costs through the offshoring. "The CGIs of the world, the IBMs of the world, they've been doing this for several years," he said, adding that perhaps an indication of how mainstream partnerships offering both nearshoring and offshoring have become is his small firm's involvement. Cavanagh has been "evangelizing" doing business globally for awhile, to use his own word. In late 2008, Ambir hosted a leadership symposium in Moncton and invited two guests with expertise working in India to share with the challenges and opportunities of integrating India into to supply chains with businesspeople in attendance. With the new partnership, Ambir is trying to account for cultural differences between the two countries: Saint John-based business consultancy Comprecultures provide training on cross-cultural communication and global business. And Cabot, which was formed by two Indian partners who each have a decade of experience working in Atlantic Canada, should understand how the East Coast does business. Shibu Basheer, chief technology officer of Cabot, said 90 per cent of his firm's clients are based in North America, so working with Ambir gives Cabot's clients people on this continent. "They get someone close by," Basheer said. The program offered by Ambir and Cabot could be successful if projects are large and specialized, according to Joseph D'Cruz, a University of Toronto Rotman School of Management strategic management professor who has studied offshoring. D'Cruz noted the firms will be competing with broad-based Indian software development shops run by such offshore giants as Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) and Infosys Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ:INFY). The professor said India's attractiveness in recent years has moved from its ability to offer highly-skilled low-cost labour for projects to its economies of scale. "That is the area today where India reigns supreme," D'Cruz said. "They can put in place a 500-seat software development team very, very quickly and there's almost no one else in the world who can mount these big teams cost-effectively and quickly." |
