Software development outsourcing has been rapidly growing in size, scale and range of services being shipped to offshore development centers over the last two decades. Just like with any new phenomenon, the ride has been bumpy and the reduction in cost has often been out-weighted by an even larger drop in quality. India, China and other Asian nations are firmly associated with technology outsourcing powerhouses.

While it must be acknowledged that the outsourcing industry in India and China have come a long way since its early days, it is also true that the quality is largely still not there. Whenever cost is the decisive factor, the quality tends to take a backseat. The stigma of cheap but low quality products is still attached to ‘outsourcing’.

The good news is that virtually none of the above is true for the emerging concept of outsourcing to Eastern Europe: Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Romania, Baltic States. Software development outsourcing to Eastern Europe has proven to be extremely successful, greatly exceeding initial conservative estimations. In less than 10 years, the industry has proven that the process does not have to be painful, the quality does not have to suffer, time-to-market can be as fast or sometimes even faster than that for in-house development, Many Fortune 500 companies have dropped their development centers in India and China to open and expand their presence in Eastern Europe. Skype service, 100% designed and developed in Estonia, has become the poster kid of the industry.
The concept has been branded ‘Smart-Sourcing’, stemming from the fact that typical projects outsourced to Eastern Europe are substantially more complex and expertise-heavy as compared to typical outsourcing to South Eastern Asia.

There are several important factors, which contributed to the overall positive effect:

Stellar Education: largely a legacy of Soviet educational system, which produced millions of engineers, mathematicians and rocket scientists every year, local universities are still considered to be top notch and provide best in class level of education and training.
Cultural Proximity: despite all the apparent differences, Eastern European mentality is much closer to US in terms of culture, values and getting things done, especially as compared to oriental ways.
Price-Quality ratio: while being very much on the same level with Indian companies price-wise, the quality of the product delivered has been substantially higher.
Inventiveness: largely a part of the national mentality, this trait turned out to be extremely useful in developing large scale complex software systems.
Getting things done approach: Eastern Europeans are famous for their down-to-the-point communication, which comes in pretty handy to deliver the product on time.
Strict Discipline: largely a legacy of Soviet-era past, discipline has been pivotal to grow the business
Prolev Technologies has made a deliberate choice to set up several development facilities in Eastern Europe: in Kiev (Ukraine), Minsk (Belarus) and Omsk (Russia). All of our employees have engineering degrees at BS, MS and Ph.D. levels and many years of industry experience.