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Arkady Khotin, general director of Arcadia, praised the program Angesleva has led.
"Everything was great and super and it's a shame that this program is finishing," Khotin said Thursday in a telephone interview. "We would have been glad if it was extended. Finns are just great." "They have provided very creative training for our staff and for all the [computer] specialists who wanted to participate in them. "I only wish that governments of other countries, Swedes for instance, would do something similar, or our own companies," Khotin added. "Now we're trying to do something similar ourselves."
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The past few months St. Petersburg's software outsourcing industry has seen tremendous growth, with large multi-national and Russian companies opening branches in the city.Read more...

The issue of trust between parties becomes very important in a software outsourcing relationship. Indeed, due to the geographical distance, one partner usually does not know for sure what exactly the other partner is doing and has only to rely on trust. Moreover, at the stage of selecting the outsourcing partner, trust plays a particularly crucial role.

Different factors contribute to the establishment of trust. These factors include: position relative to the partner, information about the partner and outsourcing in general, sentiment towards the partner and outsourcing in general, and organization of the partnership.

Trust and its attributes are explored in depth on the example of a relationship between Arcadia, Inc. and one of its partners in the M.Sc. thesis by Vegar Imsland (University of Oslo) "The Role of Trust in Global Software Outsourcing Relationships." Download in PDF format

Software development, including stand-alone applications, network applications and web-based sites and business applications can now be done easily and inexpensively offshore. The focus of this article to discuss some of the background behind outsourcing and offshore software development, and why you may wish to consider offshore software development for your future projects. Read more...

Russia has long been justly famous for the high quality and technical expertise of its human resources. Nevertheless, the image most western managers have of the country, mostly derived from Hollywood and bad press, make them reluctant to entrust critical projects to Russian companies. Russia's software industry has organized itself to deal effectively with the real quality problems and to improve their image abroad. There are still pitfalls in software outsourcing, but this article points out how to avoid them. Read more...

On the face of it, the subcontinent has an unassailable lead. Last year the Indian offshore software market was valued at more than $6.2bn, the result of 20 years of government support and encouragement for the indigenous industry.

By comparison, the Russian market was worth under $150m. So, the Russians have a long way to go if they are to create, virtually from scratch, a robust and sustainable software industry. Read more...

Summary: This report provides an overview of recent trends in Western firms utilizing offshore software development in Russia. Hindered by a lack of domestic programmers, many Western software development firms are considering Russian software companies and engineers via offshore programming. There has specifically been growing interest of U.S. companies looking for programming services in Russia. This report provides a list of some companies involved in offshore programming in Russia. Read more...

Offshore

Another high-tech exporter is Arcadia, which supplies contract software development services. Arcadia was founded six years ago by Mr. Arkady Khotin--a long-time Russian software development and project manager--to take advantage of "the thousands of highly qualified computer scientists, engineers and programmer/analysts who would no longer be employed in the government, military or R&D sector". Read more...

Arcady Khotine starts every morning with an old-style soviet. Over breakfast he, his wife, and his daughter all partners in Arcadia, Inc. inull over what another day of offshore software development holds in store.

Mr. Khotine is at the center of one of Russia's fastest-growing industries. Famed for its top-notch engineers, some of the West's biggest software houses now rely on companies like Arcadia and Typhoon Software, also of St. Petersburg, to develop software and Internet tools for them. Not only can these bigger firms outsource the most complicated pieces of their work, but they pay a small fraction of the going rate in the U.S. Read more...

Gordon Cook, Editor and Publisher

PARIS (11/04/98) - Talk about having high-quality problems! While much of the global IT industry struggles to deal with a shortage of qualified programmers -- as the planet inches ever nearer to the year 2000 and even sooner to the introduction of the euro in 11 European countries -- a Russian software house faces an employee pool of more qualified programmers in St. Petersburg than it can hire. Read more...

For Planet Software, an offshore software developer with offices in St. Petersburg, Russia, Comdex provides a place to look for U.S. licensees for some of its software, where it can negotiate new contracts for software development.
It's also a good place to get new technology ideas. "This is the place where I can ask questions that I have no one to ask back home," said Arcady Khotin, Planet Software's general manager.
The career expo held with Comdex has also been important for Planet Software. "This way I don't have to travel around to visit 20 staffing companies," said Philip Schwartz, vice president of Planet Software.

Arcady Khotin, general manager of Arcadia Inc. , in St. Petersburg, Russia, said he wrote his own e-commerce application for selling Arcadia's software applications via the Web so Arcadia's storefront would better fit the Russian market.
"We're from a country where only a handful of people have credit cards," Khotin noted.
"Remember, in Russia it's not like you can walk into CompUSA" to choose from among a host of Web-based store front packages, said Philip Schwartz, vice president of Planet Software, which is a partner with Arcadia and places Russian programmers on Western programming projects.

And in Russia, a software development company called Arcadia, Inc. has extended its business to include a training, exchange and placement program. The idea is to bring in additional software contracts, make better use of St. Petersburg talent, train and place Russian programmers for work abroad and give programmers who want to stay in Russia a crack at some international training.

Meanwhile, in Central and Eastern Europe, "there has been an excess of programmers for the last decade," says Robert Farish, IDC's research manager for Russia, in Moscow. The large, highly skilled labor force hails from the former military engineering, project and research organizations, says Michael Novikov, marketing manager for Arcadia, Inc. in St. Petersburg, Russia. "And they currently suffer from budget cuts and low salaries," he says.

This is from your old friend in St.Pete, Russia.

I'm writing this in an old Boeing 737, returning me from my almost three weeks long business trip to your country. From New York, NY up to Boston, MA and Dover, NH I went and then took the train down to Ewing, NJ and then flew to Gainesville, FL. Quite a trip for three weeks, isn't it?

It was my second trip to your country. The first one was in 1990. Back then, a few people I met planted seeds of my current telecommunications curiosity, but at that time CompuServe access was a luxury and Internet was purely academic, and BBS were hobbyists. (And there was one or two BBS in my country Russia and only academics from Moscow had tiny connection with Internet, available only for a few people and heavily controlled and we still had stable money and iron curtain just went down ) Read more...