CEE Getting More Attractive Than India and China

IBA GroupMark Kobayashi-HillaryThis blog has often explored the relative advantages of working with IT companies in the CEE region. The Central and Eastern European Outsourcing Association summarises the benefits of the region as:• Considerable budget savings;• Ability to focus on core competencies;• Extensive experience of an outsourcing subcontractor;• Speed increase in projects tasks solutions;• Reduced capital investments;• Full-time access both to IT innovations and high-qualified IT experts;• Internal processes optimization;• Improved manageability.That’s a long list of benefits. But what are the downsides of outsourcing today? There are far fewer downsides that there used to be. It’s true that handing tasks to a partner means you need to monitoring them outside your organisation and agreeing on specific measurable targets, but all managers today are used to working with some form of Key Performance Indicators – even for internal measures of success.Since 2003 the Eastern European IT market has become one of the most promising markets in IT outsourcing, demonstrating dozens of positive examples of companies the decided it would be better to stay in Europe rather than far across the world to India or China.According to the Tholons report “2012 Top 100 Outsourcing Destinations“, Eastern (and Central) European countries are now around a quarter of the entire list of most attractive places to work with.China and India are now facing sharp increases in costs just as Europe is remaining a lower place to do business. The future looks bright for those who consider Europe – and the CEE in particular – as a great place to undertake their IT business.