Outsourcing chain leads to Ukraine

  • 2011-04-06
  • From wire reports

TALLINN - Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians use Skype every day; however, few of them know that it was invented by a fellow Eastern European country - Estonia - in 2003, reports Kyiv Post. Skype Group is still headquartered in Tallinn and has more than 120 million users worldwide.

Skype was created by the Estonian developers Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn, who were outsourced by Swedish-born entrepreneur Niklas Zennstrom and the Dane Janus Friis to save on costs. Currently those Estonians who outsource often do so in Ukraine.

“Estonia is a few steps ahead of Ukraine in terms of development of Internet technologies, but when it comes to solving a task that doesn’t require advanced technologies, we outsource to Ukrainian programmers. It’s cheaper and we don’t lose in quality at all,” said Oleksandr Vlasov, the Tallinn-born owner of Vortex InterCom, a Web-resources developer in Kyiv.
Coming from a Ukrainian-Estonian military family, Vlasov moved to Ukraine in 2005 to open up his company that creates corporate Web sites, portals and online media in Ukraine. He said that the Estonian market has become saturated, while Ukraine, despite steep competition, is an “unplowed field” in terms of offering IT services.

Estonia’s road to success in technology started in 1996 when the government launched the Tiger Leap national program that boosted Estonia’s IT knowledge by educating teachers in IT and providing infrastructure and computers to schools. “By now, 90 percent of Tallinn is covered with free Wi-Fi Internet and 95 percent of Estonians use Internet at home,” said Jaan Hein, Estonia’s ambassador in Ukraine.

Apart from that, Estonia has introduced electronic governance that allows everything from signing a contract with an international corporate partner to paying a traffic fine or filing a tax declaration online. “E-governance has practically eliminated corruption in the country,” Hein added.

With 40,000 IT specialists who provide services abroad, Ukraine is in the world’s top ten for IT outsourcing, according to the association IT Ukraine. Yet very few ordinary Ukrainians feel that IT has made their lives easier because of weak legislation, according to Igor Mendzebrovski, country manager of Itera Ukraine, a Norwegian IT company that outsources in Ukraine. “We need to introduce electronic signatures, laws on protection of personal data and so on, but so far we don’t have a strong politician who would be interested in promoting it,” said Mendzebrovski.

“Unfortunately Ukraine’s government has a very low level of Internet education, for them Internet is just dabbling,” explained Vlasov why a country that has numerous talented programmers lags behind in Internet development itself.