On April 24, the Kyiv office of California-based GlobalLogic welcomed the company’s board of directors, who had travelled in from all over the world.
While international companies across many
sectors shut down their operations in Ukraine over the last year, the
GlobalLogic board members came to Kyiv to see firsthand how company operations
were going in Ukraine and to roll out new development strategies. And they did
this in spite of the worrying specter of war that has been frightening
investors away from Ukraine this year.
With its Kyiv office, which opened in 2006,
GlobalLogic also has operations in Kharkiv, Lviv and Mykolaiv, creating jobs
for more than 2,500 Ukrainian tech
specialists. It’s one of the five largest players in the outsourcing sector of the
Ukrainian IT market, and it is worth over $2 billion. GlobalLogic’s main rivals
in the local market are other global software development giants – Luxoft,
EPAM, Ciklum and SoftServe.
Sir Peter Bonfield, a GlobalLogic board member
since 2014, says that Ukraine’s main value as a base of operations, regardless
of geopolitical risks, is the strength of the local professional talent.
“The reason why Ukraine is good at what it’s
good at is that it has been very strong historically on science, technology, engineering
and math education at schools and universities,” Bonfield says.
For all the players in the Ukrainian-software
development market, success also largely depends on the outcome of the talent
pool competition rather than mere business competition, says Igor Byeda, senior
vice president and managing director of GlobalLogic Ukraine.
To increase this competitive talent pool, the
government should steer the education system towards more engineering and math
disciplines, Bonfield says.
He adds that young people need to be shown
that if they pursue work in IT, many advantages open up for them – including
high salaries, excellent work conditions, and mobility within a company’s
offices around the world. “If you are a young, aspiring person in IT, the list
of these advantages can be very exciting,” Bonfield says.
Currently, the IT outsourcing sector employs
more than 50,000 people, while around 5,000 of the most talented ones annually
get head-hunted by foreign tech companies as they search for better pay and
work conditions.
Ukraine’s international image of instability
is still a great stumbling block. “But for the current moment, the world has
got a wrong impression of what is happening in Ukraine,” Bonfield says. “The
government, I think, could do more with good publicity, good reforms and a lot
of other things just trying to get people in, to see that the situation is
actually a lot more stable.”
The advantage of the IT industry in relation
to other industries is that it provides significantly lower risks. “The only
risk in fact must be whether you’ve got skilled people or not, and that in
Ukraine is the lowest, because you’ve got skilled people,” Bonfield says.
Following the EuroMaidan Revolution and the
war in the east, for GlobalLogic, Ukraine’s worsening political and economic
situation meant less visits to potentially new clients from those who worked
abroad, as well as for those within the country.
Byeda thinks that such visits by board members
and by other employees from GlobalLogic’s headquarters in the U.S. help the
company. “It gives the real picture, not something you may see on the BBC or
CNN news,” Byeda says.
“A board meeting is a big part of
GlobalLogic’s operations and we wanted to show that having it in Kyiv is just
as normal for the company as having it in London or New Delhi,” Bonfield says.
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT
coverage is sponsored by AVentures
Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe.
