Balancing benefits, risk cost, maturity and business demands across country locations is a daunting task. We evaluate here different areas and the benefits of outsourcing in varied geographies.

Global Delivery country destinations

Global Highlights

Asia Pacific

The collective countries across the APAC region continue to constitute the largest labor pool potential, lowest cost structures, and significant breadth and depth of skills availability. This translates to some of the largest volume of sourcing across the three major regions. India remains the largest source of IT talent for exported skills, while China continues to make extensive investment in an effort to leverage its scale to compete for coveted market share.

Pros: Lowest worldwide cost structures, largest labor pools, largest breadth and depth of service category coverage and skill sets.

Cons: Largest time zone differential for biggest buying markets, continued credibility challenged for business consulting, higher knowledge services and digital business skills.

EMEA

Most Eastern European countries are continuing to grow their service export industries by 10% to 15% annually. Their value proposition begins with lower-cost labor. Although Eastern European countries are more expensive than APAC options, there are many EMEA country locations that offer well-educated workforces at a cost well below Western European labor rates. English language skills are strong and growing, and it is easier to visit European delivery centers as compared to APAC.

Pros: Quality of labor pool is good. Well-educated workforces at a cost well below western labor rates. Most significant combination of English and European languages available.

Cons: Relatively higher cost of labor, cyclical trend of exchange rates allows for lower cost, geo-political instability.

Americas

Although the use of Latin American countries for offshore or nearshore services has not reached the scale of large APAC locations, it is an important region globally for offshore/nearshore services, particularly for three categories of buyers — U.S.-based buyers, large multinationals (especially those with Latin American operations) and large multi-Latino organizations that are headquartered in Latin America, which have extensive regional breadth and depth, as well as large business operations in North America.

Pros: Time zone proximity for U.S. buyers, cultural affinity, Spanish language skills

Cons: Scalability of labor pool, relatively smaller buying market, higher cost of labor, relatively low English language proficiency and limited ability to scale IT labor.

Global outsourcing should be done keeping all these things in mind. Choose a region that will prove to be optimal in cost as well quality of the service. When finalizing your sourcing strategy, follow these guidelines for choosing an outsourcing partner.