Build-Operate-Transfer: The Case Study

As competition for experienced engineers intensifies across North America and Western Europe, many technology leaders are confronting a hard reality. Local talent pools are no longer deep enough to support sustained growth. Hiring cycles are stretching longer, compensation expectations are rising, and even well-funded companies are competing for the same limited profiles.

At the same time, fully outsourcing critical engineering or operations work introduces its own risks. Loss of intellectual property control, misaligned incentives, and brittle handoffs often undermine long-term outcomes. For organizations that care about durability, not just speed, neither extreme is particularly appealing.

This tension has driven renewed interest in the Build-Operate-Transfer model, commonly referred to as BOT. Rather than choosing between full ownership and full outsourcing, BOT allows companies to move gradually into new geographies while maintaining a clear path to long-term control.

Under a BOT model, a partner builds and operates a dedicated team or satellite office on behalf of a client. Once the team, processes, and systems reach maturity, ownership is transferred fully to the client. What makes BOT distinct is that the end state is not vendor dependence, but internal capability.

Across SaaS, fintech, and enterprise software, BOT has become a repeatable way to scale global engineering teams while preserving architectural standards, institutional knowledge, and strategic flexibility.

Why BOT Has Gained Momentum

The appeal of BOT lies in its ability to reduce early-stage risk without compromising long-term outcomes. Establishing a foreign engineering subsidiary from scratch requires legal expertise, local market knowledge, and operational bandwidth that many companies do not have during growth phases. Traditional outsourcing, by contrast, often optimizes for short-term delivery at the expense of ownership and continuity.

BOT sits between these models. It allows companies to enter talent-rich regions quickly, test assumptions about productivity and collaboration, and build teams that are structurally designed to become internal.

This distinction matters most for engineering and product organizations, where:

• Architectural decisions compound over time
  
  
• System ownership affects velocity and reliability
  
  
• Domain knowledge is difficult to replace once lost
  
  

BOT enables companies to invest in these areas early, rather than deferring them until after a handoff.

SAP Builds an Engineering Hub in Bangalore

Engineering-focused BOT implementations tend to be more complex, but also more strategically impactful. SAP provides a well-documented example of how large software organizations have used BOT-style approaches to establish and scale global engineering hubs.

SAP selected Bangalore due to its deep engineering talent pool and strong technical education ecosystem. In its early expansion phases, SAP relied on local partners to build and operate engineering teams before transitioning them into fully owned SAP Global Development Centers.

During the build and operate phases, SAP emphasized technical parity across regions. Engineering teams adopted:

• Shared CI/CD pipelines
  
  
• Standardized development and testing practices
  
  
• Unified observability and incident response tooling
  
  

Engineers in India participated in the same sprint cycles, architecture reviews, and release processes as teams in Europe and North America.

Over time, SAP’s Bangalore organization grew to thousands of engineers and took ownership of major enterprise platforms and core product lines. What began as a staged expansion became one of SAP’s most critical global engineering centers.

The long-term impact extended beyond cost efficiency. SAP accelerated product delivery, reduced reliance on third-party vendors, and built durable internal capability through structured transfer.

PayPal and Secure Offshore Development

In fintech, the stakes of global engineering expansion are even higher. Payment systems, financial data, and regulatory compliance leave little room for ambiguity around ownership, security, or accountability.

PayPal offers a real-world example of how BOT-style models have been used to build secure offshore engineering teams. As PayPal expanded globally, it partnered locally to build and operate engineering teams in India before transferring full ownership into PayPal-controlled entities.

Security and compliance shaped the engagement from the outset. Engineering environments were built to PayPal’s internal standards for:

• Access control and auditability
  
  
• Secure software development lifecycles
  
  
• Infrastructure consistency across regions
  
  

Teams worked exclusively on PayPal systems and followed the same development, testing, and deployment processes as onshore engineers. Infrastructure was provisioned using standardized, repeatable configurations, enabling reliability and compliance at scale.

As ownership transferred, the teams and systems were already deeply integrated into PayPal’s global engineering organization. Today, PayPal’s India engineering centers are core contributors to payments infrastructure, risk systems, and platform development.

This case underscores a critical point. BOT is compatible with highly regulated domains when governance, security, and technical expectations are clearly defined from the start.

Parthenon Management Group and Dedicated Team Expansion

BOT is not limited to large organizations or multi-year timelines. Parthenon Management Group, a U.S.-based association management firm, used a BOT-aligned approach to expand delivery capacity quickly.

Facing difficulty sourcing specialized talent locally, the company partnered to assemble a dedicated team that operated as an extension of its internal organization. Engineers worked within Parthenon’s existing technology stack, communication norms, and project management systems.

The team became operational within weeks, allowing the company to support growth without overloading internal staff. Over time, responsibility transferred fully, reducing operational overhead while preserving continuity.

This example highlights BOT’s flexibility. Even when timelines are compressed, the model provides structure that avoids the pitfalls of ad hoc contracting.

Hexaware and Standardized BOT Models in Enterprise IT

Enterprise IT service providers such as Hexaware have formalized Build–Operate–Transfer into a repeatable model for building captive engineering and technology delivery centers. In addition to its global delivery footprint, Hexaware has increasingly applied BOT-style models in Eastern Europe, particularly to support European and UK-based enterprises seeking senior engineering talent, regulatory alignment, and closer time-zone collaboration.

Hexaware has established engineering and delivery centers in Poland, which function as nearshore hubs for software engineering, cloud platforms, data systems, and enterprise application modernization. These locations are commonly used in BOT-style engagements where clients want to build long-term internal engineering capability without assuming early operational risk.

During the build and operate phases, Hexaware supports clients by handling local setup and stabilizing engineering operations while teams work under the client’s technical standards. Key focus areas typically include:

• Local entity setup, compliance, and security baselining
  
  
• Hiring against clearly defined technical skill matrices
  
  
• Standardization of CI/CD pipelines, code quality, and documentation
  
  
• Knowledge transfer milestones and leadership readiness
  
  

By the time ownership transfers, clients inherit an engineering organization that is already functioning as an internal team, with established systems, clear ownership, and minimal dependency on the original partner.

Siemens'. Distributed Engineering Centers

Siemens provides a strong example of how BOT-style, staged expansion models can be applied to complex, engineering-heavy organizations. As Siemens expanded its global software and systems engineering footprint, Eastern Europe became a core region for building long-term engineering capability.

Siemens has established major engineering centers across Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic, supporting work in industrial software, automation platforms, embedded systems, and digital manufacturing technologies. Many of these centers were built using staged approaches that mirror BOT principles, with early partner support for local operations followed by gradual transition into fully owned Siemens entities.

These Eastern European hubs play a critical role in Siemens’ global engineering organization. Teams contribute beyond feature development and are responsible for:

• System-level ownership and platform evolution
  
  
• Compliance-sensitive engineering tied to industrial and infrastructure systems
  
  
• Participation in global design reviews and roadmap planning
  
  
• Adherence to shared architecture, safety, and release governance standards
  
  

Over time, these staged expansions have resulted in fully integrated Siemens engineering centers that contribute to core platforms across automation, industrial software, and digital infrastructure. The Siemens example demonstrates how BOT-style expansion enables companies to scale sophisticated engineering work globally while preserving intellectual property ownership, system integrity, and long-term resilience.

What Successful BOT Implementations Have in Common

Across these real-world examples, several patterns emerge. Successful BOT engagements treat engineering teams as future internal organizations from the start.

Common characteristics include:

• Early enforcement of technical standards and tooling
  
  
• Clear system ownership and decision rights
  
  
• Planned leadership development before transfer
  
  
• Investment in documentation and knowledge sharing
  
  

Most importantly, BOT works best when companies invest in systems and processes, not just hiring. Architecture standards, shared ownership models, and operational clarity are what allow knowledge to move with the team when ownership changes.

The Strategic Case for BOT Today

For engineering leaders navigating a global talent market, the question is no longer whether to build distributed teams. It is how to do so in a way that scales without creating long-term fragility.

BOT provides a structured answer. It allows companies to access talent-rich regions, move quickly, and retain control over what matters most. When executed well, BOT is not a temporary workaround, but a foundation for durable global teams.

At Carbon, we view BOT as a way to design for transfer rather than dependency. The companies that succeed with this model are the ones that see global teams not as a cost-saving tactic, but as a strategic asset built to last.

Carbon is the go-to staffing specialist for Eastern European and North African technical talent. Trusted by the biggest names in technology and venture capital, Carbon’s hyperlocal expertise makes entering new talent markets for value-seeking global companies possible.

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