There are two main reasons:

• shortage of domestic IT professionals in the USA and Western European countries
• customer's wish to cut development expenses.

Drew Robb's article from "Information Week" magazine explains both mentioned reasons. Click here to view this article. Why are Pakistani offshore software development companies are popular at the market? Important reason attracting customers to Pakistani offshore software development market is a relatively low level of programmer's salary and small overheads. It allows to minimize expenses that in many cases is the determinant.

These two terms are often confused, but they are not the same at all. Contracting is when a company (customer) purchases services from another company (supplier). In this situation, the customer "owns" and controls the process. In other words, the customer tells the supplier exactly what it wants and how it wants the supplier to perform those services. The supplier cannot vary from the customer's instructions in any way. The customer can replace the supplier quite easily by canceling the contract. In outsourcing, the customer turns over the control ("ownership") of the process to the supplier. The customer tells the supplier what results it wants the supplier to achieve, but the supplier decides how to accomplish those results. In outsourcing, the supplier has expertise in a certain process (such as programming or WEB-development, etc.), and it has economies of scale. If the customer were to dictate to the supplier how to do the job (as happens in contracting), the customer would be destroying an important aspect that makes outsourcing work - the value that is created by using the supplier's expertise and economies of scale. Telling the supplier how to do the job also eliminates accountability on the part of the supplier, and this is an important element in successful outsourcing relationships.

Here is an example of software development services that are outsourced and that are contracted.

Contracted: The customer says it wants a program for staff planning. The customer tells the supplier how this program should work, how screen and printed forms should look like, which programming language and development tools should be used, etc.

Outsourced: The customer says it wants to automate the process of staff planning assuming that he needs some software to reach the result. The customer describes his intentions in general way, assigns the limit of expenses that he is ready to spend and provides supplier with all necessary information about planning rules and practice in customer's company. Then the supplier decides how to accomplish the task, how many programs customer really needs, should these programs be implemented as client-server system or no, which programming languages and database systems are the most suitable, etc.

We don't want to say here that one of these two models is better than another. Depending upon the situation, each of these models may be desirable and successful. MachSol has an experience in both.

Absolutely. We can submit development reports, current source code and application demos on a regular basis. We can give you ftp access to all development files to see and control the development process at any time you like. Also we make a working schedule so that a customer may see an application framework, demos and UI at the early stage of the development process. This let you make early corrections to the design, shorten the number of design-development iterations for large and complex projects and considerably save your funds as the result. You can also suggest you own ways to monitor the process to make yourself feel confident.

Absolutely but provided that you and we have clear understanding about the application to be developed. After we negotiated and agreed on all the features, functionality and UI, we will be able to make a specification, working schedule with milestones and checkpoints. Also our project managers work overtime often to ensure good dialog and prompt replies to your questions.

Most often our customers hold the copyrights and own the final product. This is fixed in the contract.

We are quite flexible and ready to consider your suggestions.

We have to say that some of our customers don't want us to provide source code or even ask us to delete it after we have completed the development. Thus our best work can not be presented to you. Nevertheless what we can show is also quite impressive. Write to us for receiving source code excerpts. If your company has own programming style, our developers have experience in following different coding styles and meeting different code requirements.