December 27, 2006: ICT Leaders Discuss Opening Finnish Innovation Centre in St Petersburg.

A senior delegation of Finnish government and ICT leaders met with Russoft and Ardin Software representatives to discuss the opening of a Finnish Innovation Centre in the city. The meetings took place at the headquarters of Arcadia Inc.

See the press-release about the event: http://www.russoft.org/docs/?doc=1290

October 23, 2006: Pushkin in Arcadia. Next step.

Arcadia and the Pushkin House (Institute of Russian literature) concluded a state contract on realization of a project “Informational support of the Pushkin House scientific research” which is carried out within the framework of the Institute’s IT-modernization program.

The two parties have been in cooperation for over two years and one service agreement succeeded another leading to great performance and mutual benefits. Nowadays the Institute’s portal www.pushkinskijdom.ru is one of the best innovative sources about Russian cultural legacy. The portal united more than a thousand pages, including electronic copies of encyclopedias, volumes of bibliography and topic-related databases.

Arcadia caters for support, maintenance and implementing new features in order to facilitate the search process for dedicated specialists and curious visitors.

Also see the press-release published on May 3, 2006.

September 26-28, 2006, Helsinki, Finland: Ardin Software and Arcadia participated in Helsinki ICT Week event.

The event was hosted by Wanha Satama exhibition complex in the Finnish capital, embraced 20 exhibiting companies and about as much of merited speakers – representatives of Finnish and international ICT industry. During those three days Wanha Satama was attended by approximately two thousand people.

Among the speakers on September 26 were our Director General Arcady Khotin and Antti Akras, the head of a partnering company ACD Consulting. They delivered a message and made a presentation titled “Vendor Management in Multi-Sourcing of Software Projects”. The general idea in question concerned not only business model theory, but explicitly covered the practice of multi-sourcing to Russia, one of the leading software-development destinations in modern reality.

Nine of more than thirty “Scandinavian” companies were selected to send their delegates to Helsinki and present their service offerings and accomplishments. These were Arcadia Inc., CSI International, Decosp, Driver-Inter, Hansa Consulting, Lanit Tercom, Metalink Ltd., Soft-Consult, Science Soft. The representatives of these firms managed to establish good business connections with interested Finnish entrepreneurs and share their experience with local colleagues in adjacent IT segments. Judging by the past experience gleaned from such events, these contacts have a tendency to develop into real projects and long-term partnership.

Ardin Software Oy’s motto “local in Finland, local in Russia” attracted a considerable number of decision-makers who are nowadays trying to define their outsourcing strategy and – not less important – report on the financial savings that result from successful near-shore cooperation. Many specialists agree that Ardin provides real benefits to the Finnish industry – being a “one-stop shopping” place, a skilled adviser on development process organization and a domain-knowledge holder.

On September 26 at the reception arranged by Ardin Software and the Russian Trade Mission in the premises of the latter, representatives of Finnish business and Russian IT firms had a chance to discuss cross-cultural peculiarities and concluded that those were mainly exaggerated and could not be considered an obstacle in the parties’ relations of any kind. Finnish-Russian cooperation has increased in both political and business currents, which was emphasized by the Russian officials. As Victor Sorokin, the Deputy Trade Representative in Finland, put it: “I am sure that today’s business conference of North-West Russia IT firms with Finnish companies will reinforce further business development in this field. The Trade Mission is ready to support such cooperation which helps young and talented programmers of Russia realize their knowledge into practice by attracting new projects from Finland”.

September 18, 2006: another Mobile Monday event in St. Petersburg

This MoMo's topic was mobile applications and Arcadia acted not only as a technical sponsor of the event, but also as one of the main speakers.

An Arcadia Project Manager told the audience about our experience in developing web-portals for mobile devices. He focused on the ASP.Net Adaptive Controls, which is a proprietary feature of Arcadia. The goal of this platform is to facilitate the work of creating mobile web-applications. One of its capabilities is supporting various programming languages used on the web.

Besides that, the speaker paid attention to certain problems that every mobile developer in Russia has to face, such as picture resizing troubles for mobile devices, testing complexity and the lack of orientation to complex application in this area.

More info available at: http://www.spbit.ru/news/n10225/

July 3 – 7, 2006: A group of Executive MBA students from Cass Business School (London, UK) visited Arcadia, Inc.

Five Executive MBA students from Cass Business School (a branch of the City University), London, spent a week at the premises of Arcadia studying our processes, environment and long-term goals. The initial stage was gathering information about the company, this was performed in close cooperation with mid-level and top managers of Arcadia. The guests organized separate interviews  with the key people in the company as well as informal conversation with the majority of Arcadians. As a main point of their visit was a consultancy project focusing on prospects of the company development within the ever-changing domestic IT industry and its notorious problems – lack of qualified human resources and growing western-based competition.

In the consultancy project created by Executive MBA students they paid special attention to the importance of differentiation (top-notch quality, vertical segments orientation, etc.) and targeting niche markets. Besides, the possibilities of new business currents, such as product offerings, catering for domestic market and bringing essential amendments to the existing offshore software model were on the agenda.

Providing the external view, Cass Business School students recognized traditional “soft” and “hard” asters of Arcadia: such as entrepreneurial creative drive and corporate family culture on the one hand and invaluable human capital on the other hand. The British colleagues are planning to deliver an elaborate form of this report on Arcadia and its objectives after further investigations and research. Both parties considered their collaboration mutually beneficial, the managers of Arcadia have established warm business and personal relationship with the Executive MBA group and is cherishing hopes to continue the cooperation with Cass Business School in the future.

About Cass Business School

Cass Business School is one of Europe’s leading providers of business and management education, consultancy and research. Cass is located on the doorstep of the City of London, one of the world’s foremost business and financial centres. The top-rated programmes range from undergraduate to masters, MBA, PhD and executive education.

To view a press-release, please, click here.

June 19, 2006: Arcadia acted as a sponsor of the Mobile Monday (St. Petersburg) event.

Mobile Monday (MoMo) is an informal event for ICT companies, which started in 2000 in Helsinki, Finland, and since then has been held monthly in different parts of the world (U.S., Europe, Latin America, Asia).

MoMo St. Petersburg was organized in cooperation with Mikhail Novikov and sponsored by Arcadia, Inc., Arcadia recruitment agency and I-Free company. The speakers were Jari Tammisto (Mobile Monday Helsinki, the event founder), Eugeny Krouglov (Marketing director, United Fun Traders), Yuri Ivanov (CEO, Arcadia ) and Victor Naumov (Beiten Burkhardt).

The participants emphasized positive tendencies in developing IT infrastructure in Russia and its obvious integration into the world-wide network of ICT.

For more information, see SPB IT site. Also have a look at the event photos.

May 31 – June 2, 2006, Moscow, “Renaissance” hotel: Arcadia, Inc. participated in the RUSSIAN OUTSOURCING & SOFTWARE SUMMIT 2006.

The latest summit of Russian software developers was dedicated to the possibilities and prospects of domestic software field and particularly the export of products and services.

Among the participants of the forum there were representatives of the largest Russian companies as well as foreign customers and business analysts. One of the main points of discussion was the role of Russian software export compared to that of the regions – traditional IT suppliers (India, China).

According to experts’ estimations, the total revenue of Russian export in IT sphere reached 1 billion U.S. dollars by the year 2006. Despite the fact that Russia is still falling behind its eastern competitors in this figure, many western companies regard Russian developers as first-rate partners concerning the question of business processes optimization and solving complex IT problems.

As for the disadvantages of domestic software industry, foreign and Russian analysts emphasize shortage of qualified human resources (severe demographical situation being one of the reasons), the relatively small number of MBA and management specialists, the low rate of internal and external communication among executive managers. Nevertheless, high technological and scientific potential of Russia and cost-effectiveness of its software services traditionally act as attractive factors of domestic IT business.

Unfortunately, the stereotype of Russian market as a volatile structure implying economical and legal risks, as a rule turns out to be a stumbling-block when communicating with foreign customers and investors. However, those clients who have already been involved into interaction with Russian software developers, note the high level of responsibility and reliability of their Russian outsourcing partners. The summit participants admitted the necessity of coordinating marketing efforts in order to generate an “All-Russian success story”, which would aim at demonstrating the benefits of Russian software services and their correlation with international quality standards.