Dear friends,

I have an IT services company registered in Ireland and with a delivery center in India. we have 50+ resources, working on three business lines - Data, Cloud (Azure / AWS / Salesforce).

I live in Zurich and I am thinking how to get IT projects in the above mentioned areas from Switzerland.

Any suggestions or help is appreciated.

Regards

I just sent you a PM

I may be slightly naive but I'll ask anyhow.

Why would someone want to assist in taking jobs out of Switzerland?

Lots of companies are cost cutting... the big outsourcers, like Wipro, ComputaCenter, Capgemini, Cognizant, etc have teams of people in Switzerland to for sales + liaison.

Companies like to leverage the extremely low cost base...



The local project managers typically get flown in, stay here 4 years, then move... I was speaking to one who wanted to stay until they got a C-permit, but their company was very good at moving them around a lot.



That way, you are "stuck" on a tied B permit, then they get someone else in.

There are already some big players in the market (Irish and Indian) who have been providing outsourcing/near shoring services for years. Companies like Accenture, IBM, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, Tech Mahindra etc... They operate not just in India, but also globally.
Most of Swiss companies who were interested in have offshoring/near shoring models have already established their development centers in places like Pune, Bangalore, Bratislava, Warsaw, Prague, Bologna, Barcelona, Lisbon, Cluj, Casablanca etc...
I would say you have almost slim to no chance of succeeding. Sorry

I think you need to be registered as a company in Switzerland to be taken seriously. If you are employed in Switzerland then you also need to ask your employer if they do not have any problem with that.

That would be a NO and a NO.

Good luck.. but anyone big enough to have Salesforce will already be wooed by the 'big guys'. At your size you need to have a 'niche' solution to gain any attention.

do you really have 50+ employees? It's unlikely that someone with no commercial skills can build a company this size.

I have friends in the IT marketing field as well as friends who run IT services companies in India. However, when someone claims to have a team of over 50 members in India, it's wise to take it with a grain of salt.

In reality, they possess a bit of knowledge in IT sales and lack a legitimate company presence. Their approach involves cold-calling companies in an attempt to secure meetings with CTOs or Development heads, delivering a standard sales pitch. When a company expresses interest in a specific skill set, they gather resumes by posting job listings on prominent Indian job websites. For instance, if a CTO expresses interest in AI expertise, these salespeople present resumes of individuals with over "a decade of AI experience". If, by chance, discussions progress, they hastily reach out to smaller Indian companies to negotiate deals. This process may involve stages like Proof of Concept (POC) and Request for Proposal (RFP), similar to the way the sex trade or prostitution operates.

If OP is offering prices comparable to say Poland, Slovakia or Romania, thats a massive disadvantage due to time difference (and if they force folks to always work till/after midnight than you know you pay an amoral sweatshop with adequate consequences long term).

If they offer much lower prices, then its an empty bluff since experienced folks in India in tech centers don't have much lower salaries than east Europe.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that ship has sailed some decade+ long ago. Not even going into small detail that well paying bigger companies have limited set of companies they contract from, no way an outsider can get in, unless comparable with ie Accenture in size and fame. Hiring outside of Switzerland can get easily attention of various Swiss state offices, very few businesses want this sort of attention.

So they are operating in the same way that “the sex trade or prostitution operates”, in order to take Swiss citizens jobs away?
Makes a great deal of sense based on my personal experience.

Where did this nonsense come from?

The sex trade is surely one where no one needs any proof of the concept.

And maybe you’re getting confused with Indecent Proposal?

This is just nonsense. There are plenty of small to medium sized software companies selling software services to all sizes of Swiss companies including the MNCs. That of course is out side the expat bubble which maybe why you don’t know anything about it.

I know because I have spent over three decades here and have both sold and bought such services. To mention a few I have been involved in: Nestle, Novartis, Syngenta, UBS, Dow, Credit Suisse and Swiss Re for example.

In my experience, many major Swiss companies pretend to be interested in quality but really go for the lowest price.

I remember a Swissowned multinational when I entered the "sanctum" of the group responsible for employing IT contractors, on the wall they had a huge time chart recording how they had reduced the average daily rates paid.
That company never delivered an IT project on time, often years later.

One time I got the job of pressuring an Indian company who won their contract with a very low price but turned out to be very poor at reporting progress, eventually they admitted they had outsourced to Vietnam.

"It's a jungle out there"

Having been in the midst of it all, can only confirm this.

The outsourcing companies have about 20 (cheap) staff members in or more in India per one one Swiss placement, that are dedicated to researching and providing info. 24 / 7.

Why fight against this as a Swiss person?

From a business point of view there are to aspects to IT - the data processing side and the business intelligence side. On the data processing you are just interested in cost - this is the regular run of the mill accounting and manufacturing process stuff and the objective is to do it as cheaply as possible. It is the domain of the the outsourcing companies, most of the contractors and expat IT types. It is known as Corporate IT.

The other aspect is the business intelligence side, where adding value to the business process is the concern, not cost. It is where most of the small local Swiss IT companies play. In most cases the principals in these companies have specialists knowledge and the business contacts to land the projects. The projects get deployed to the corporate IT platform through some kind of exceptions process. This is a very profitable are, because there is no cost competition and business people can get budget approval much easier than IT since they are the ones earning the profits.

__________________
"There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living." - Nelson Mandela

Dear all,

Thanks for all your perspective. Our company is 7 years old and we have been already been doing business in the UKI. Our Data and Salesforce LoB are pretty stable, however, in the Cloud area, we have some bench.

Our aim is to expand in Europe and Switzerland is one of the target markets; hence, this thread.

On the market potential for SF, at the pace at which SF is growing, the supply is not able to match up. The big companies are primarily focused on the enterprise segment, but there is a huge tail of small and medium segment customers who buy licenses but struggle to implement and / or maintain it. We have a market there, where we have been operating. There are many players in this segment as well, however, we have a few competitive advantages.

I got your valuable suggestions and I take some action items to work from these. Thanks a lot again to you all !

Switzerland is not the UK. You will find that very different regulations and employment laws apply here.

Moreover IBM has a huge presence here providing SF solutions. They have an offshore centre in Bratislava with teams specialized in SF. I'm not sure how OP could compete with big players like IBM, unless he partners with IBM.