France-Morocco offshore web development has been based on pillars shaken by the health crisis of 2020, creating a model more suited to the realities of the new post-covid world.
From the early 2000s to 2019, French ESNs, digital agencies, start-ups and companies of all sizes and in all sectors have used offshoring. This is to respond to the pressing challenges of digitization and the increase in the flow of web / mobile development activities, particularly with service providers in Morocco or through the implementation of branches, a pillar-based outsourcing concept, completely shaken by the crisis. health care of 2020, the birth of a model more suited to the reality of the new post-covid world.
The starting point: a strong imbalance between supply and demand
Quentin Périnel, director of the Le Wagon code school, describes the imbalance in an interview with Le Figaro Management: “France has a severe shortage of web developers and needs 50,000-60,000 profiles per year.”
So what are these old pillars of offshoring that have been interrupted and how are there today new areas of collaboration between the digital ecosystem in France and Morocco, especially to meet this important need for technical skills.
Development outsourcing is no longer limited to activities that require an intermediate level of engineering or are tied to legacy technologies.
Having acquired more than ten years of experience, the employees of the service centers of the main French ESNs in Morocco now integrate specialist skills in various conceptual and technical professions: R&D, Dev leads, architects, product owners, UX designers, DevOps, consultants in transformation digital … helping engineers in France to structure digitization projects.
A talent pool that is starting to attract US cloud, big data and AI giants as well, seeing real opportunities there, such as Oracle, which opened its first R&D lab in Africa in 2022, or Salesforce through its branch in Casablanca which offers consultancy services for its clients in Europe.
The technical production of the service centers in Morocco has made a great leap in quality
This concerns several areas, Morocco has made great progress in the field of telecommunication infrastructures, with an Internet penetration rate of 93% of the Moroccan population, as well as in the training component with technical schools according to international standards, or through the creation of new schools that use disruptive methods, such as the opening of Xavier Niel’s school 42 or the implementation of the Le Wagon school network.
Morocco has a pool of young talents who are deeply open, passionate and experts in the best mechanisms of technological AI, Big Data, blockchain, cybersecurity and product development for start-ups, while leveraging two geostrategic resources:
- Morocco’s position as a leader in Africa in the banking, insurance and transport sectors.
- And the recent opening with the United States on an economic and cultural level.
Two points that have led their destiny in enriching the skills of Moroccan engineers and developers to meet important quality requirements and mature, allowing them to adapt to different development methodologies and ecosystems.
White label collaboration
Increasingly, white label collaboration agreements are being replaced by three-way contracts in which the final customer in France is fully informed about the contribution of the project actors in Morocco.
Not only for reasons of compliance with the rules of the RGPD, but above all because service providers in Morocco are stakeholders in the steering committees and in the decision-making process on important architectures and technical choices.
The search for low development costs is no longer a priority
In the current context of scarcity, this point is relegated to the second degree; And it is clear that no French company today would miss the opportunity to recruit its developers in France, because the issue of availability is essential to carry out projects for both large companies and SMEs.
The improvement of the skills and the quality of the services of the outsourced teams in Morocco justify the cost of salaries and work structures today higher than in the past, in order to retain the most talented, because achieving a level of development mastery requires many years of investment and experience.
Finally, if it were no longer a question of low-skilled and low-cost labor, offshoring as a cheap concept would no longer be able to describe the whole reality of the web outsourcing sector between France and Morocco. it has thus become an attractive best-cost destination.
The predominance of the post-Covid telework format has also significantly contributed to opening up new possibilities for collaboration.
In France, the structures that have managed to effectively adopt an organization and a corporate culture based on new ways of working at a distance have made the most of these new foundations of outsourcing:
- Internal or external managers and talents are aligned and equipped to achieve production goals regardless of geographic area.
- And for managers it is a real discovery of a lever of growth, of formidable efficiency, without sacrificing quality.
Thanks to these developments, new synergies and collaborative practices have emerged, with “obsolete” economic relationships between customers and subcontractors that have begun to give way to true technological partnerships between the actors of the two ecosystems. driven by a common pursuit of innovative and high-performance performance.
In this way we strengthen the historical and very strong ties that connect France with Morocco and that can be found in the world of digital development.