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Home / Insights / Blog / How to Choose a Custom Software Development Vendor? Here are 5 Key Points You Must Consider
February 4, 2020 - by Brijmohan Bhavsar
In the age of digital transformation, custom software and automation have become the drivers of change. Most enterprises understand the value of a well-built software to smoothen their business process, optimize workflows, respond to various situations as they emerge, drive business quickly, and offer impeccable service to their customers. However, many of them underrate the efforts required to develop and roll out custom software that works well and pushes desired results. This is the reason why these enterprises, when it comes to selecting a good customer software development vendor, focus on traits that are not necessarily critical to their requirements. While choosing a good vendor is not an easy task and there is no one-size-fits-all strategy, there are few qualities that a custom software development vendor must possess in order to drive value for an enterprise. Let’s look at the top five qualities:
Technology is always evolving, and that means when you’re looking for a custom software development vendor, you need a vendor that constantly keeps up with change.
Having a software development company that serves a wide range of technologies can ensure that you will be working with a development team that is ready to work on any kind of requirement. This can reduce a couple of roadblocks that are unforeseen at the time of planning.
Identifying whether the company has experience in cross-vertical industries can help you understand how well they would be able to match your requirements that are industry-specific as well as beyond.
In the saturated ISVs market, it is important to find companies with open delivery models – as it means they are agile and can adapt rapid technology changes.
Not all companies can take all kinds of software development projects – some can go for long-term projects and work on innovating technological solutions and other small-to-medium scale companies that can go for a project of a particular size and offer a specific solution.
If you have a budget restriction and you can’t choose to go with an ISV with an open delivery model, ask yourself the following questions to make the right selection from the available vendors:
Many organizations overlook one important aspect – whether or not the company is capable to expand or reduce the team based on the need of the project. In a fixed- cost project, the size of the team remains the same throughout the project regardless of whether each resource is needed or if supplementary resources are required. This is a classic example of limited flexibility and can lead to many costly problems down the road if the vendor is unable to scale as per the need of the client.
The software development vendor should be able to dedicate a team of developers that can vary in size or alter out one expert for another depending on the customer requirements and the project needs.
The software vendor that you select must have set-up security measures at various levels of their development to ensure security at all levels: physical security, networking security, database security, and ad-hoc security for any specific project requirement. This process will ensure that there aren’t any security outages when the software developed by the vendor is deployed in your ecosystem.
Last but not the least, discussions with the vendor about intellectual property rights is critical before making the final decision. You might not want to go with a vendor that retains all rights to any and all intellectual property surrounding the custom software you are paying to develop. A good practice is to ensure that even before the scoping work begins, you have the legal agreements and non-disclosure agreements in place.
Monetary factors shouldn’t be the sole aspect of the decision-making process when selecting a custom software development vendor. Trusting a software development vendor that only harps about low-cost development can lead to a critical investment disaster if the above-mentioned considerations are not taken care of. With a perfect software development partner, you can be sure of high-skilled development teams, feature-rich quality software, budgetary matters under control, lesser risks, and most importantly – achieving the right outcome out of the entire process.
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