The Rise of Eastern Europe
I was in Heidelberg this week, and had a number of conversations with people making hiring decisions on lowcost software development centers.
It struck me how significant Eastern Europe is becoming in this equation.
The biggest concern I hear about India in general, and Bangalore in particular, is that salaries are becoming way too high, attrition much too significant, cost of hiring prohibitive, and cost of losing employees after investing 6 months of training just plain annoying! Of course, the infrastructure issues are additional.
I also sense that many decision-makers tend to think of Bangalore as synonymous with India, which is unfortunate.
It’s great that Eastern Europe is now able to leverage the software off-shoring boom that is driving jobs to countries and cities that were previously starving for industry. It is, however, not great that India is doing such a poor job in educating the global managers on the merits of other Indian cities as viable low cost destinations.
Hello Nasscom, wake up!
Agreed, recently Indus Logic the Indian pioneer in outsourced product management bought out a firm in Ukraine and established a presence for precisely the above reasons - Note they also changed their name to Global Logic !!!!
So I would not be surprised if the Indian giants like Infosys, Wipro and others acquire or start large scale operations in the Eastern European zone.
Yes, I think it is a very good trend - to share the fruits of development, and spread it across geographies. Also, I have to say, time zones and travel becomes a lot easier when the off-shoring partners are (a) closer (b) in closer time zones. For Western Europe, Eastern Europe is by all means a better place than India.
The question is, will Latin America emerge as an alternative for similar reasons, to serve North America?
This will be a major blow to India.