The
EC Group is in the talent business. But while the firm is headquartered in Comstock Park, its talent base is in Chennai, India.
The EC Group's focus is to provide an outsourced solution for medium-sized organizations needing talented, reliable software developers and testers that will complement a firms existing I.T. staff.
According to Josh Roley, it is the firm's hyper-focus on relationships that makes its services different than other competitors. "We allow smaller companies to have the control over their projects," he says. "They can handpick the services and individuals to meet their virtual needs. We like to say 'your team, in our office, in India.' We house, provide oversight and train the developers and testers."
Roley acknowledges that outsourcing has the potential to be very intimidating to small businesses and says "it can be dangerous" for organizations who do not do their homework. EC actually coined a term, "Hosted Offshore Software Teams" (HOST), to distance itself from many of the stereotypes of staff augmentation firms that provide outsourcing services in that industry.
Besides the potential cost savings, Roley cites the challenges in finding homegrown software talent as one the factors why firms choose outsourcing as a solution for their software needs. "There is a huge talent crunch in the U.S. The people of India are emerging from poverty and there is a tremendous motivation and drive in their culture to get ahead with an emphasis on education. In their culture, they see becoming a software engineer as the path to the future."
The firm was founded in 1999 and currently has five employees and will be adding a senior account manager in early fall. Its current client base is entirely from outside of West Michigan.
To learn more about the EC Group, you can visit their site
here.
Source: Josh Roley, EC Group
Writer: John Rumery, Innovation and Jobs News Editor
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