Offshoring Goes West

Screen Magazine, a U.K.-based monthly magazine covering developments in the global financial IT and data businesses, devotes a feature article to the fact that firms are increasingly turning to Russia and Eastern Europe rather than India and China for their offshoring projects.

“While India and China get all the attention in discussions of offshore outsourcing, countries in the former Eastern Bloc are jockeying for the attention of financial services firms looking to move processes overseas”, writes the magazine. The article provides an impressive amount of analytical data proving its assertion. “Fewer than 10 percent of major financial institutions had moved processes offshore in 2001, according to a recent study from accountants Deloitte. By 2006, over 75 percent of major financial institutions had operations offshore”. The article quotes Alexei Miller, “There is a shift from an all-India strategy to a global multi-sourcing strategy involving emerging geographies such as Eastern Europe,” says Alexei Miller, executive vice president of DataArt, a software developer that helps companies use global resources for outsourcing.”