Russia Aims to Rival India As World Outsourcing Leader

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, August 2001
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“I’m finding the technical expertise [in Russia] is very high,” says Ken Pocek, manager of a software lab that Intel Corp. opened last year in the central Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. The chip maker employs 100 programmers at the lab, plus another 100 contractors elsewhere. “It’s a nice matching between our needs and their expertise. I don’t think we could duplicate this experience anywhere else in the world.”

Offshore programming started in Russia in the early 1990s, when U.S. companies such as Sun Microsystems Inc. opened software-development centers here. The word is spreading: Russia’s low labor costs, a shortage of IT specialists in places like the U.S., Germany and Scandinavia, and the drive to cut overhead during economic downturns have prompted more Western firms to outsource to Russian developers. (Read more…)