Clients and software developers need to move their global outsourcing relationships up the value chain to reap greater benefits. Yet such moves bring costs and risks. The authors investigate the strategies that differentiate successful and unsuccessful value chain moves. Case studies from longitudinal research identified synching as a key success strategy: building client- developer congruence along six identified dimensions. Synching can be problematic because distance still matters in our supposedly borderless world. Distance particularly constrains the synching of tacit knowledge, informal information, and cultural values. Clients must recognize this-- and the external shocks to synching that occur over time--and adopt appropriate buffering tactics.