The East is Rising

IBA GroupMark Kobayashi-HillaryInternational analyst firm Gartner recently suggested that IT Outsourcing this year would be worth around 697 billion Euros. That’s an enormous amount of business and IT service companies are all keen to find a way to enjoy taking a percentage of that global spend for themselves.While countries like India, China, and the Philippines have dominated the international outsourcing market, there are many locations in Central and Eastern Europe that are now snapping at their heels. Serbia, Romania, Albania, and Croatia are all examples of locations where many IT specialists are located and yet their cost is lower than experts with the same skills in Western Europe.A recent report on the software development and IT outsourcing industry in Ukraine determined that over the last eight years, the volume of software development and IT outsourcing services in Ukraine has grown by a factor ten.According to the research findings, in 2011 the volume of IT outsourcing and software development services provided in Ukraine reached US$ 1.1 billion and the number of IT specialists working in the industry reached 25,000 people with 20% growth.But in many cases, many small companies with no international footprint are located in these countries, ready to do business, but unsure how to find clients in the west. It’s no good just being a lower cost if you have no way to develop relationships with potential clients in the west of the continent.The East may be rising in importance and certainly worth a look if you are considering outsourcing your IT services, but the companies that are based in the CEE region need to build better relationships with the clients in the west. Without this, they will forever be seen as just a lower-cost alternative to local IT experts and that is a long way from the truth.