Typical ODCs

Typical understanding for setup of ODCs would involve the customer Outsourcing a set of Non-critical tasks to a vendor in an offshore location. This vendor would use some resources from the existing team, or hire additional resources and perform the task for the customer. Once work is proved satisfactory, the scale of the Outsourcing is increased by the customer. More-or-less always, the work is never really something that is extremely Time-critical, innovative, or requiring high levels of project management. Outsourcing to an ODC has been more in the area of maintaining Pre-existing code, testing and so on. Any task that requires higher project management and interaction levels between the remote centers is usually not Outsourced. The Customer-vendor relationship is usually based on the Man-hours of work put in on the task by the vendor's resources, assigned to the task. This is a model that has been consistently used by customers round the world for Outsourcing to vendors in India. This model though successful has certain limitations such as -

1.	Inability to Outsource requirements that need a lot of interaction between locations or Project Management.
2.	Outsourcing is always very complex as most customers find it difficult to generate Requirement Specifications that mention all requirements clearly. This makes Project Management difficult, and deliverables delayed.
3.	The vendor tends to remain purely as vendors, and don't really contribute ideas towards improving the product design and features.
4.	The model ends up being costlier on the long run, when the operations need to be scaled up, as compared to having a subsidiary.