Observe Ukraine possibilities

Information technology in Ukraine

Being always the technical region of the Soviet Union, positive legacy left for Ukraine in a form of developed scientific and educational base. Here are some bright facts and statistics to depict the situation.

1. Ukraine is a space-enabled country, has an international governmental space programs, as well as specialized production facilities and research institutes.
2. A developed academic network is working in the country and educates thousands of skilled specialists each year. The statistics says that literacy rate in Ukraine is 99%. For each 10 000 of population there are 107 students studying in more that 300 universities of III-IV accreditation levels.
3. The traditions of physical, mathematical, and programming schools are really strong as the result of technological legacy. Nearly 60% of universities are graduated in these areas. The IT specialists are prepared in numerous universities, specialized schools and internationally certified courses.

As an assistance for IT education there is available up-to-date literature both in English and localized versions, developed Internet infrastructure and academic computer networks.

Specialists

As a consequence Ukrainian IT specialists are recognized in a world and are demanded in a really wide set of industries! In early 90-th a lot of IT professionals left Ukraine to work on-base with foreign companies but now this changes. With the development of outsourcing new generations choose not to leave their homeland and work as off-base personnel for prospective IT-enabled companies.

The new generation of Ukrainian specialists is goal-oriented, active, highly motivated and already approached western standards of business. Young age of the IT offshoring in Ukraine allows attracting best professionals within short time scale.

Cost and market

Even if the labor cost is slightly above the level of India’s, still it is below the cost in Russia and already many outsourcing-oriented companies realize benefits of working with Ukrainian service providers.

Ukrainian IT outsourcing services market development, 2000-2006

Though the industry is still young the trend is quite bright in statistics – average growth of IT outsourcing in Ukraine is 40% per year and the market volume was estimated $150 mln in 2005 in research of “Market Vision”. But there also other estimations by Ukrainian Hi-Tech initiative group exist: overall export of IT services in 2005 is equal to $500 mln and growing (perhaps freelancers are accounted there).

New investment opportunities for the world outsourcing direction are opened by positive changes in social and economic life of Ukraine. Those are additional incentives for boosting partnership with Ukraine.

See also Ukraine - general facts

Additional resources:

www.infopulse.com.ua/About+the+company/About+Ukraine/default.aspx
www.hi-tech.org.ua/Ukraine
www.itbusinessedge.com/item/?ci=1645