Software is an industry
in which CIS companies have proven themselves
to be internationally competitive, both in contract
(offshore) programming as well as proprietary
product development and sales
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Entrepreneurial opportunities
Many Russians, not least Mssrs Mastrukov
and Sviridenko, used this opportunity to be
entrepreneurial, rather than become part of
a multinational.
Arcadia
is a St. Petersburg firm founded six years
ago by Mr. Arcady Khotin "to take advantage
of the growing opportunities arising from
Russia's move to a free market economy," says
his partner in the US, Mr. Philip Schwartz
of Planet Software, a firm that works with
Arcadia.
Mr. Khotin himself spent over 20 years as
both a software developer and a project manager.
In fact, he was Software Development Manager
for one of the first Russian-American joint
ventures and was responsible for supervising
over 100 programmers. Arcadia
was founded, he continues, after Mr. Khotin
"recognised that thousands of highly qualified
computer scientists, engineers and programmer/analysts
would no longer be employed in the government,
military or R&D sector after the end of
the Cold War."
Sometimes this Cold War-forged skills are
used directly in highly-technical projects.
Soft Nav Ltd. is a St. Petersburg-based company
development of real-time and embedded systems
for avionics with emphasis on, for example,
Global Positioning Systems. The company's
foreign customers, says General Manager Nikolai
Mikhailov, are such firms as DASA and Dornier
Satellitesysteme in Germany.
More often, however, the applications are
really rather different.
Arcadia, for example, has worked on more
traditional projects, such as groupware, image
compression algorithms and such Internet-based
components as front ends to Real Audio, CGI
and considerable work in Java (a programming
language that came into existence well after
the end of the Cold War).
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