LVIV, Ukraine – Lviv, the unofficial capital of western Ukraine, is also the capital of information technology business in Ukraine. And the city looked the part when it hosted the massive Lviv IT Arena tech conference on Oct. 2-4.
More than 1,400 participants from Ukraine and abroad gathered for the event – nearly double the 800 who came for the first-ever Lviv IT Arena in 2014. The event took place at the city’s impressive new Lviv Arena soccer stadium.
“The Lviv IT Arena conference is unique because of the diversity of its audience,” said Stepan Veselovskyi, the executive director of Lviv IT Cluster – the alliance of more than 30 local IT companies that organized the event.
The event attracted 100 speakers, including representatives from Facebook, SAP, IBM Design, Epson, HP, Mail.ru. Ticket prices ranged from $95 to $145.
The Lviv IT Cluster includes some of the biggest outsourcers and software developers operating in Ukraine, like SoftServe, Eleks, GlobalLogic, Devcom, and N-iX. Less than 30 people were involved into the conference organization. The organizers have not disclosed the event’s budget.
While most of the other tech conferences in Ukraine focus on narrow subjects, Lviv IT Arena spread its net wide, pulling in designers, CEOs, top managers, entrepreneurs, and investors from various IT fields.
“We’re proud that participants from Ukraine and the whole world come especially to Lviv for our event,” says Veselovskyi. “This means that Lviv has very rich ground for IT development.”
One of the foreign guests was Max Gurvits, a partner at CCC Startups – a Bulgarian organization that builds startup communities. He conducted a session on startup execution at Lviv IT Arena.
Gurvits says he’s been watching the Ukrainian IT market closely. He finds Lviv tech community much more progressive than the Ukrainian tech market in general – it’s better connected to the global IT industry and more eager to fill gaps in skills and experience – common problems for the Ukrainian IT community, he says.
“From everything I’ve seen in Ukraine over the past years, Lviv definitely has the most resilient, growing community,” says Gurvits. “In a future where city ecosystems will be more important than country ecosystems, this is a very important asset for the local community to keep nurturing.”
Wiktor Doktor, CEO at Pro Progressio, a Polish company analyzing outsourcing and shared services industry globally, was at Lviv IT Arena to talk about the Polish markets of information technology outsourcing and business process outsourcing.
According to Doktor, Ukraine’s IT industry is very poorly promoted abroad. If Ukrainian companies were more active on their international marketing and public relations activities, they could draw more business partnerships and investments into the sector, he says.
“In Poland we need to know much more about the Ukrainian IT market,” Doktor said. “To be honest, information about the scale of the industry, information about who the providers are, and what scope of services they offer, is very limited. Having had the opportunity to talk to a number of Ukrainian companies during the Lviv IT Arena, I must say there’s huge potential, and the industry is definitely much bigger than I thought.”
The representatives of major Ukrainian outsourcers also took the stage. Yury Antoniuk, the head of software company EPAM Ukraine, stressed the importance of government support for the IT industry, as well as the need for the awareness of Ukrainians about the value of IT companies in the country’s economy.
Among the most crucial problems, according to Antoniuk, is the constant brain drain of the smartest tech engineers abroad, along with unclear legislation, which means tech companies prefer to register abroad and do their business there. He pointed to the examples of Looksery, a Ukrainian app recently acquired by Snapchat, and Viewdle, which has been acquired by Google. Both were registered in the United States.
“We have very good examples of how excellent Ukrainian startups are. But I don’t know any startups that bring money to Ukraine,” says Antoniuk. “We need a modern education system and very visible and transparent rules for business here.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Looksery, and SoftServe.
