This article highlights the recent trends observed with Western companies using offshore software development in Russia. Prevented by the lack and expensiveness of domestic software engineers, lots of Western software development companies consider Russian software companies and software engineers through offshore programming. The U.S. companies specifically interest in programming services outsourced to Russia. We will also name some companies involved in offshore programming in Russia.
According to analysts, in 1999, Russia earned $70 million in offshore programming services at an annual turnover $560-580 million. The Russian business of offshore programming is ascending at 50-60 per cent year over year and is anticipated to be able to reach the required track record and international certification and turn into a strong performer in the offshore programming market and even outperform India.
The US companies only start to cast their glances the benefits of potential cost-saving opportunities in Russia for offshore programming. Russian software engineers are highly valued in the domain for their deep knowledge in mathematics and engineering sciences and their lower cost as compared to US and European programmers. A customary Western company is able not only relieve current lack of in-house software developers but can also save up to 50 per cent in costs.
As a rule companies dedicated to offshore programming services have a vast pool of specialists like: project managers, team leaders, system analysts, software architects, quality assurance and quality management engineers, test engineers, technical writers, designers, systems administrators, etc. We can enumerate about 100 Russian companies engaged in outsourcing for Western companies, and 10 to 15 Western multinationals have already established offshore programming centers in Russia.
Russia’s main destinations for for offshore outsourcing are Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk. They all have their peculiarities: St. Petersburg is less expensive compared to Moscow and has better developed infrastructure than Novosibirsk. To meet Western software development requirements, some St. Petersburg top-performing software development companies united their efforts and established the “Fort Ross Information Technology Services” consortium which goal is to coordinate its members activity and promote its members’ services globally. The history of most of these companies dates back to 1991-1994, thus they have 10 to 12 years of experience in outsourcing. Moreover, Fort Ross supports close ties with leading St. Petersburg universities. Russian IT outsourcing companies are able to work either on site or offshore under hourly or fixed price contracts, they provide the full scope of IT solutions: Web development, e-commerce, Web design, Web server applications, Web database applications, software/hardware reengineering, etc.
The fundamental advantages of offshore software development are:
Western organizations already consider Russia as the way to solve the lack of IT staff. Several IT giants have already moved a part of their development to Russia.
At the beginning of the millennium Intel established its own offshore development center in Nizhny Novgorod to develop and support software for Pentium microprocessor.
Indeed, there is an option to hire Russian independent IT professionals who are currently unemployed or paid very poorly as compared to their counterparts in industrialized countries. Nevertheless, finding such specialists does not yet mean to solve the It problem: it might take months to move him to location due to immigration restrictions.
But it is advisable to keep tight control over project management from your part to keep offshore programming projects on track. Both parts must know and understand what must be done and what is anticipated.
The future of this sector is quite mixed: