Grow your business to Iasi, Romania: Who is already here?

In the previous article I was inviting you to come here, to Romania, and more specifically to Iasi. I told you about the many advantages of establishing here a remote office for your business (http://bit.ly/mMN3GH). But this is far from being enough reason to invest here.

So, who else is here in Iasi? What other companies had the nerve to invest here, to build large offices and employ tens and hundreds of people? 

Here are some of the big names that came, in a random order... ok, except the first one which is not that random, but currently I work for them.

 

·         Comodo CA / Comodo Security Solutions Inc. (http://www.comodo.com)

“Comodo is Creating Trust Online® because none of us can realize the full potential of the Internet unless it's a trusted place to interact and conduct business...”

·         Siemens VDO / Continental Automotive Romania (http://www.vdo.com)

“The Automotive Group of Continental AG is one of the leading global automotive suppliers. With its three Divisions – Chassis & Safety, Powertrain and Interior – it achieved sales of approximately 15 billion € in 2008. The Automotive Group employs more than 80,000 people in more than 130 locations worldwide...”

·         Pentalog (http://www.pentalog.ro)

“Since 1999, Pentalog has been implementing a high-performance service offer based upon the right mix of local and offshore services for each and every project…” 

Endava (http://www.endava.com)

“Endava is a leading European IT services organisation, with offices in London, New York, Romania and Moldova. Our dedicated delivery centres in Eastern Europe support the full project lifecycle, from application delivery and testing through to support, hosting and managed services…”

·         Embarcadero (http://www.embarcadero.com)

“Embarcadero is committed to providing the industry’s broadest and deepest set of software tools for developers, DBAs, and architects...”

·         Synygy (http://www.synygy.com)

“Synygy Inc. is the largest and most experienced provider of sales compensation management (SCM) software and services. Synygy also provides a set of related sales performance management (SPM) solutions, including sales data management, sales reporting and analytics, sales workflow process automation, and sales performance planning…”

·         Mind CTI (http://www.mindcti.com)

“MIND is a leading provider of convergent real-time end-to-end billing and customer care product based solutions as well as call accounting solutions for organizations and large multinational corporates…”

·         Amazon (http://www.amazon.com)

“At Amazon.com, we believe that innovation has the power to change the world. As we strive to become Earth's most customer-centric company, we constantly look for new ways to innovate on behalf of our different customers…”

But this is not all. There are also local companies that got in the big league, expanding their business world-wide:

·         Infoworld (http://infoworld.ro)

"The quality and reliability of Info World software soon prompted our company to penetrate the international market, with customers in locations such as United Kingdom, South Africa, Bulgaria and the Republic of Moldova.

Over the years, Info World has broadened its interests and began designing software for other areas, such as e-learning, process management, occupational health and safety, psychological testing, striving to meet the growing need for intelligent information systems…”

·         BitDefender (http://www.bitdefender.com)

"BitDefender® is the creator of award-winning, internationally certified Internet Security and Antivirus software.
Since its inception in 2001, BitDefender® has continued to raise the bar to set new standards in proactive threat prevention, in many cases leading the way in the best Internet security detection techniques to prevent the spread of malicious threats..." 

Softpedia (http://www.softpedia.com)

Also, you might want to try the quality of service here, and what is a better way of doing it than outsourcing some of your R&D work to our local companies? I am not getting into details because at the moment I don’t know them all, and I would hate to get them wrong. What can I tell you is that we have so many of them, developing for all known platforms, OSes, and using all the programming languages and environments you know.

I will reserve one of the next articles, exclusively for 100% outsourcing.

If you wish to find out more, just send me a message.

Note: The brief information is as found on their own websites. This info might be out of context, so please browse them if you want to find out more.

Where is Iasi, Romania?

Grow your business to Iasi, Romania: The perfect place to expand your R&D operation!

If you are looking for the perfect location to build your new R&D center probably the best choice is Iasi, one of the biggest cities of Romania (http://bit.ly/hmNTTe), well connected to the rest of the world. Romania is in the EU, so an European country.

Why is that?

1) First of all you are interested in human resources availability.

"Alexandru Ioan Cuza" (http://tiny.ly/Udfv) is the oldest and currently the best university of Romania (576 place in the international hierarchy).

"Gheorghe Asachi" Technical University of Iasi (http://bit.ly/ivudLJ) is not far from this position. There are other several universities.

All these make Iasi a huge learning center, that serves a very large region of Romania (counties: Iasi, Vaslui, Botosani, Bacau, Neamt, Suceava) and it is capable to offer you all the human resources you need to build your R&D center.

We are talking about highly qualified programmers at lower salaries than in the rest of Eastern Europe, high level of foreign languages speaking: English, French, Italian, Spanish etc. 

2) Now, you would like to hear about salaries. I won't give exact numbers, but their level is the lowest compared to the other big cities in Romania like Bucharest, Arad, Timisoara, Brasov, Cluj.

Of course, this does not mean that it will stay like this, but will give you enough time to grow, adapt and adjust smoothly.

What about the quality of this resource? I can only tell you what I learned about this in the last 4 years (http://linkd.in/jVv86R). Our company hired 100+ people: developers, support technicians, designers, antivirus analysts, etc. I worked with most of them and with proper management and motivation they will do magic. They are eager to learn and are constantly looking to improve themselves, they work hard and “I cannot do it” is not in their vocabulary. They stay focused as long as needed and always deliver.

3) At this point you need to hear about one more thing, Taxes. Well, this is not a simple topic and needs a separate thread. But one thing that you need to hear is this: tax exemption for employees working in IT companies (and have graduated the faculty), so the company does not pay the 16% tax from gross salary (which means attractive net wages can be paid with a lot less expense for the company).

4) Another concern is where to establish the office. There are plenty of buildings where you can rent space for your office. And in case this wasn't enough, there is a big business center being built right now, that will double availability. We are talking of course about A and A+ office building (http://bit.ly/lTTXvG, http://bit.ly/jU2Dau).

The prices vary from 5 to 15 EUR per square meter.

5) Internet connections are great and will couple of hundreds EURs per month you can buy 15 up to 50 Mbytes per second broadband connection, fiber optic all the way. When we talk about broadband networks, Romania is occupying a place in the top 5 in the world, among countries like South Korea and Japan.

I told you a lot of pros... But what about cons? I can think to only one right now, the airport. It's a small one and does not have direct flights to common international locations, just couple of big Europe cities.

But I think you will not really care about this, with all the money you save from everything that is much cheaper here (that we discussed above).

Having all these said, the city of Iasi is looking forward for you to expand you business here.

If any questions, do not hesitate to ask... and you'll have to excuse me if I don't answer immediately.

Where is Iasi, Romania?

(The credits for dark red text go to Radu - Thank you!)