Two recent articles about Russia caught my attention as our Flatsourcing development team is based in Kazan, Russia. Last week’s Business Week featured an article on the current oil fueled economic boom in Russia by Jason Bush, Russia: How Long Can the Fun Last?. In it he points to the software industry as a showcase example of Russia can and is moving from natural resource-based economic success into knowledge-based growth.
And Russia is well ahead of most other resource-rich countries in its economic development, with a long tradition of education, science, and industry. Now, its tech companies are starting to give India’s outsourcing sector a run for the money. Software exports will top $1.5 billion this year, vs. just $128 million in 2001. “We really can compete on a global scale,” says Dmitry A. Loschinin, chief executive of Russia’s largest software developer, Luxoft.
This is really interesting to us as we continue to build our partnership with our Russian team. I have tremendous respect for their education system after traveling to Kazan last spring. I believe in that because of the strength of their education system in science and engineering disciplines that Russia is becoming a world leader in software development very quickly. And we plan to be part of that through Flatsourcing.
Speaking of Russian developers, the New York Times featured an article today by Eric Pfanner titled New To Russia: Google Struggles to Find Its Footing about Google’s struggles in competing in the Russian search engine market. My take on it is that the challenge has been issued and Google will continue to climb in market share in Russia.
The company’s difficulties in Russia probably have more to do with the complexities of the language than with politics.
“Our understanding of Russian was not as good as we wanted it to be,” said Kannan Pashupathy, head of international engineering at Google. Google revamped its Russian site last week, Mr. Pashupathy said, improving its ability to deal with Russian, a complex language in which nouns may be one of three genders and be declined in up to six cases.
This article also is great read. It’s fun for us to see this focus on technology and software development in Russia, and it is clear that our little secret won’t be such for long.
Are those guys self taught? How did Voodoo get connected with Flatsourcing in the first place? I am glad that Russia is getting the opportunity to become a player.
Hey Blake -
They actually all are pursuing degrees in computer science at university in Kazan. I’ll have Oleg respond to this post with more. Thanks for the question.
Hello Chris,
Thank you for the post, it’s indeed music to our ears to hear that we’re getting close to India’s experience. I’m sure it’s a long way to go, but as I can tell from local infrustructure is growing and allow more and more IT companies to be estblished within large IT-parks it’s definately something that is going to happen in closest future.
On the education of the majority of IT-workers in Russia I can say that conceptual producer, directors and general managers are considerably old and sometimes have old-school technical knowledge of the IT, and the actualy developers, designers and project managers are are usually not older than 25-30 probably as Internet boom happened around 1999 year over here, so I can say that future top managers and general managers are still to come, maybe second Google or anything else - it’s a fast-growing market and a lot of smart techy people around, we all have to keep up with them all the time!
Majority of us are graduates or post-graduates of major 2 Universities in Kazan: Kazan Technical State University (Computer Science faculty) and Kazan State University (that too has Computer Science faculty, which is more theoretical probably).
Thank you for the question! Hope any of this info will be of any use to anyone!)
Have a great Holidays, guys!
Oleg