A lot has been written about the usefulness of outsourcing. It is cheaper; an outsource team is more likely to successfully deal with your project than a couple of nearby programmers; you can freely concentrate on important strategic issues without having to spend time and energy on non-core functions; and a lot more reasons. In today's globalized and networked economy, outsourcing is now thought of as an everyday issue. So the question new is not "Why outsource?" but rather, "Where to?"

Offshore outsourcing has gained worldwide popularity. There are several outsourcing centres, and the most powerful among them are India, China, and Eastern Europe. In the aspect of saving money, the first two have been leaders in recent years; but now other important sides should also be taken into account, due to which Eastern Europe looks more and more attractive.

First, the global tendency is that the cost of living and the salaries are becoming more or less even everywhere. So the benefit of low price is not as noticeable as before.

Second, the approach in Asian countries can generally be described as "a complex machine": there are a lot of programmers working on each project, each one is assigned a rather small task. Those people are no high-skilled specialists; they are rather just faceless working force. In comparison, an Eastern European team is normally smaller in number, but all programmers have higher education and rich experience.

Third, the quality of software produced in this Asian fashion sometimes fails. The proverb of "too many cooks spoil the broth" proves true in this respect. Many programmers each doing his own little task are likely to produce a lot of errors which cannot be cleaned out even after several rounds of testing.

Also, there is the language and culture problem. Asian languages and mentality differ a lot from the Western world, and it ensures additional obstacles in the development process, together with the fact that many of the programmers do not have a good knowledge of the customer's language. This means that project descriptions and instructions have to be interpreted rather than just read and executed, and an interpreter's mind may distort the details of the project vision.

And, in addition to all that, it's rather hard to communicate with Asia due to time zone differences and far-away location.

All these facts are reasons why countries of Eastern Europe has come up as an alternative to traditional offshore destinations. This attraction is easily explained by highly skilled workforce, shorter journey times, smaller time-zone differences, European language skills, and western culture. When outsourcing to Eastern Europe, customers can rely not only on the development process, but also on more serious issues such as business audit and consulting, decision making, and architecture building. As software is becoming more and more complex, those issues are considered to be of the utmost importance.

The most attractive offshore work centers in Eastern Europe include Czech Republic, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Belarus. These markets offer highly educated and experienced programmers, reliable management staff, and comprehensive infrastructure. Work performed in Eastern European countries is much more scientifically intensive than that which is produced in other markets. Besides, the benefits are a close proximity and cultural ties to Western Europe. Among the other advantages, one can define political stability and government commitment to the industry. Also, Eastern Europe has highly efficient school system that adds thousands of skilled labor every year to its professionals. They deliver faster and higher quality solutions at lower costs.

These are the reasons why Eastern Europe has become so popular for software development purposes in recent years, and why DigitalXpert's decision was to concentrate its development centers in Russia and the Ukraine.

For details on what DigitalXpert's specific benefits are, please click here.

Back...