In the past few years I have worked with both types of teams being my center of operations the USA. Both have pros and cons. At this time the Indian offshore teams have a huge advantage over the Latin American teams just for one simple reason: "The time when they entered into the US industry was the correct one”.

However, in the long run I am a firm believer that the Latin American contingency will take over the roles that their Indian counterparts have now.

As I mentioned before I see pros and cons with both teams; on the Indian side the rates they charge appear to be very competitive but that is in theory. In practice this rates add up because of delays in delivery, bugs found, etc. making the delivery more expensive than initially estimated and what is more important; many times the deadline is not even met.

There are many companies in the US and EU using Indian offshore teams; initially it was the way to go but throughout the years these same companies are growing unhappy for the quality of delivery (Coding Standards, Unit Testing, etc.) having to spend more time and money to fix things that were not fixed initially.

A couple of years ago while working with our offshore Indian team I had a phone meeting where I explained what was needed (a web form written in C# - ASP.NET), I sent the use cases and test cases to our Indian counterparts. Two weeks later I received a zip file with no release documents (which were requested) and a Windows executable which show a form with the fields requested. The problem; the PM did not understand the request and instead of asking questions he went ahead and have his team develop a windows form instead of the requested web form. Does this sound somewhat familiar? Yes, I have met with many CTOs and they have experience this problem at some level or another.

Please, do not get me wrong, I know there are EXCELLENT developers in India but the way the industry is using them is the wrong one.
Now, the Latin American development teams have to grow and learn what their Indian offshore teams have learned by doing business with US companies. This is a big issue at this time, but it is something that can be mastered.

What I see as a big pro and a driving force for these Latin American teams are the following points:

1. The two most spoken languages in the Western world are English and Spanish making it easier for developers, PMs and executives to communicate.
2. The Hispanic market in the US is growing at a fast pace and many executives (CEO, CTO, CFO) are also fluent in Spanish. Also, Latin American PM’s for the most part are fluent in English.
3. Latin American teams are getting trained to develop applications following the usual guidelines as well as agile methodologies. Scrum and XP are being used to be able to deliver pieces of applications in short iterations.
4. Culturally, Latin America is closer to the USA and EU than India.
5. The time difference is almost non-existent. Let’s take New York City as an example. When it is 8:00 am in NYC it is 8:00 am in Lima, Peru and 10 am in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
6. The travel time to any offshore office in Latin America from the USA is short compared to a trip to India.
7. Rates are competitive and in some cases are even lower than the Indian rates.
8. The base of developers is growing in Latin America. There are educational institutes that are using their own home grown software developers to be able to offer offshore services.
9. There is already a huge sales network of sales in Latin America for USA and EU products (software and material).
10. The most used Latin American countries for software development are Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay where the economies are growing and there is political stability.

Finally, while traveling in Peru last October I met with a company that is developing software for an Indian company that is exporting its products to the US. Isn’t that interesting? I have seen that trend growing more and more in Latin America.