Friday, June 17, 2011

IT Outsourcing in Contemporary Russia

The current state of IT and outsourcing industry in Russia is on the uprise. Just consider the following fact: the average rate of growth of Russia's economy is significantly lower than the rate of growth of IT.

The financial crisis, which occurred over two years ago, forced clients to reconsider their attitude to "the impossibility of outsourcing critical functions of IT". Most businesses took another look at the age-old practice of outsourcing and had to acknowledge that the last decade significantly changed the IT industry. The heads of IT departments stopped fearing losing company value by outsourcing some functions. Outsourcing has progressed to a level that would have been reached otherwise in three to five years, had the financial crisis not occurred.

The main difference between Russian and Western IT outsourcing remains in the absence of mutual trust between the outsourcer and the consumer in Russia. Furthermore, the success of the Western service provider is based on the high level of innovations and the originality of the service. Lately the most popular topics for discussion have been cloud technologies and rendering services according to principles SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service). These new approaches, on one hand, will bring a new wave of interest from a growing number of clients, and on the other — a wide range of offers from outsourcing companies. Without a doubt, there will be unique cases in working with each individual model, and every implementation would have to take into account all particular features of the client: specifics of the business, level of infrastructure and quality of personnel. But the commonality of all these cases will be the increase in mutual trust and responsibility of the outsourcing company for the result of the service project.

Today more than a half of clients feel that they must switch to the outsourcing model in the nearest future, and more than one-third already have some level of service agreements and are planning to expand them by implementing new types of services in software development, testing, and maintenance and support. Russia is wide open to all new opportunities in outsourcing.

Source: The Moscow Times

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