Here is Andy Hilliard's story about his visit to the outsourcing market in Vietnam
We travel the world assessing software development locations and companies and we help companies (typically North America, Western Eur and Aus) find the ideal software partner through a matching and recommendation process. Just last year we were in Vietnam assessing future partners and the development landscape. Here are some of our findings related to this question:
Size: Vietnam has 100M people. A very good population base from which good programmers can be developed.
Infrastructure: Vietnam has relatively very good infrastructure in terms of roads, internet bandwidth and basic services
Economy: characterized byhigh economic growth, low inflation, good price stability.
Language (English): not as good as India or Philippines but better than many other Asian locations and catching up fast especially among the software engineering population.
Culture (country): A good blend of tradition and Western
Culture (programming): We found the Vietnamese programming environment very impressive: hard working, diligent and a little more creative and extrovert (consultative) than other Asian locations.
Supply/Demand of Developers: Good, probably for at least the next 5-8 years as Vietnam is still not a mainstream choice and they have a large supply of engineers in the pipeline.
Cost: Competitive or better than India as India is experiencing huge demand pressures and inflation
Quality of Developers: This is the tricky part. Places like India have so much more history and such a large engineering population that they can typically charge less as a loss leader and then rationalize margins later through switching out programmers. India has the advantage of experience and talent pool size but Vietnam has some very good developers.
Turnover: Very good, much better than India and other Asian locations.
Safety (visiting): There are no safety warnings from the US government and we felt completely safe in HCMC and traveling around in nearby areas. The only warning we were given multiple times was to watch out for our cell phones.
Andy Hilliard
