This article addresses two geographic areas of well-qualified and affordable outsourcing contractors: India and Eastern Europe. China, the "rising super power of outsourcing," is not part of this article's focus.

There's a pretty big difference between working with Indian and Eastern European contractors.

Indian contractors generate the solutions to your specifications. They do the work quickly and in many instances they do it very well, if you ask them to perform tasks that are within their area of expertise.

Of course, communication issues apply. So, unless the specifications are communicated well, misunderstandings can easily happen. However, if you work with a reputable company, then any problems resulting from minor misunderstandings are usually corrected quickly.

Indian contractors are likely to do the job to your specifications - or the way they understand the specifications - even if they know that what you want to be implemented is a bad idea. Further, if they have better ideas, they may not tell them to you, unless you explicitly encourage them to do so - and some Indian people seem to have difficulties with expressing consenting views even when they are encouraged to do so.

However, if you know precisely what you want, and you need it to be done quickly and as cost effectively as possible, it's more likely that Indian contractors are very well suited for the job.

Generally speaking, Indian contractors tend to provide better customer service than Eastern Europeans do. That, and reduced stress levels that are associated with the good quality customer service, make a big difference in many instances.

On an average, Eastern Europeans tend to work at a slower pace, and are much more opinionated. The latter may be a good thing: if you need feedback on your ideas or development approach, it may be hard to get that from the Indian contractors. In some instances the latter may be a real problem.

However, Eastern European contractors are likely to provide their opinions, whether you ask them for that or not.

Further, Eastern European contractors may even act on their convictions and ignore your input. In such instances, when the contractor is convinced that he or she knows better how to accomplish something, and is wrong about it, it's very likely that he or she will attempt to take you and the project development, too, in the wrong direction. If you react to it too late or less than firmly, you can assess and try to deal with the damage only after it has been done.

Language abilities can also create obstacles.

It seems that the overall ability to communicate in English is much better in India than it is in Eastern Europe.

Working virtually, so that technology connects dispersed participants, requires in many instances written communication, which requires good typing and language skills and aptitude for written communication. That seems to be a problem for a lot of people in any part of the world.

To overcome this issue, the party that drives the project's development, has to know what information and when needs to be exchanged. If the outsourcing partner is sufficiently service-oriented and continuously provides the needed information on time, things can work out well. Otherwise, virtual working arrangement may not be a good solution.

Eastern European application developers tend to produce better quality and more original web and user interface design. Indian developers generate "mass produced" solutions very efficiently which, of course, are not particularly original and do not reflect the true nature of the customer and the product very well, and do not help to differentiate the website owner company or the product offering positively. Of course, there are exceptions to this and good design solutions can be created when working with Indian designers as well, especially when the solutions are generated collaboratively.

Information design and application navigation structure design tend to be poor in both regions.

If truly good, original design, information architecture and application navigation structure are important, it's more likely that a suitable solution provider can be found among the best US or Western European companies. The best of these companies do charge considerably higher fees, but in many instances the higher fee is a worthwhile investment.

We at Project Developer, Inc., tend to use moderately priced user interface, navigation structure and information design solutions that meet our requirements.

In many instances Indian contractors with comparable skill set are less expensive than Eastern Europeans are, and there are somewhere 4 to 10 times more of them (depending on the exact area of expertise in question).

If you need to work with Microsoft's technologies, it's easier to find good quality solution providers in India than in Eastern Europe. Eastern European developers favor open source solutions, especially PHP and MySQL.

Good quality programmers can be found for good prices in relatively "far East" in Eastern Europe, like Ukraine or Belarus, for example. However, it's difficult to hire people or companies from there or from other parts of Eastern and Central Europe, because of lack of outlets for doing so like different online marketplaces are, where many Indian highly qualified companies can be found. Most Eastern European - and even Central European - programmers and companies do not participate in these types of contracting interactions. However, if you happen to know or can find people who are familiar with the specific Eastern European country's culture and act as facilitators, your chances of finding the right professionals from specific countries in that part of the world are much better.

Briefly, things in Eastern and even Central Europe get done largely by "knowing the right people," while Indian companies operate more following Western style open market principles.

The more west you go in Europe, the more expensive the European contractors tend to get. For example, good quality Central European contractors (in Poland and Rumania, for example) are no longer in the "affordable price" range. Similarly, in the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) you can find mediocre developers relatively inexpensively, but good ones tend to cost considerably more than equally good Indian contracting work does. Further, often enough the contractors in Central European countries tend to set their prices by Western European standards, while producing results whose quality is measured by their local standards.

In addition, if you hire really good programmers or designers in the Baltic States or in Central Europe, it's likely that you will have to deal with the persons egos quite a bit along the way. This can get quite annoying.

There's one more factor to consider: time difference, which in the US East Coast favors Eastern European contractors and in the US West Coast favors Indian contractors. Workday starts in most Indian companies around the time it's very late at night in the US East Coast. The time difference between Eastern and Central Europe and the US East Coast is smaller.

However, in many instances communicating with 1 day delay is not a big deal, especially when issues and code and other development work sent to us needs to be reviewed anyway before we respond.

An ideal solution in many ways is to have a mix of good quality, dependable solution providers-partners in different places. This allows tapping into each contractors strengths and allows us to reach different projects objectives so that we can deliver high quality software solutions for very competitive prices.