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Even as many Western companies turn to India and China to seek IT and business services, a growing number is finding countries like the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus more suitable
When Deutsche Bank, the Germany-based global investment-banking powerhouse, needed to replace its legacy customer-relationship management system with a new one in March this year, it turned not to what would been an obvious choice to many, one of the global IT services giants like Capgemini or IBM, or an Indian outsourcing service provider. Instead, Deutsche Bank turned to a Russian boutique IT provider called Luxoft that has a total staff strength of about 1,000 professionals.
"We talked about Canada , Ireland and low-cost locations in the U.K. But it really came down to India and Russia ," says Dan Marovitz, Managing Director, Deutsche Bank. "But every time we went over to India and we tried to get things going and do a little pilot, we found it difficult to get traction. We spent time knocking around India at all the big companies. It was hard to get them to focus on something that would be pretty cutting edge, but would start very small, and where the forward roadmap was very much a work in progress."
"In Russia ," adds Marovitz "we found people who think on their feet, which is what innovative projects like ours needed. And in Luxoft, we found experts ready to grill us with tough questions; just what one needs for complex projects."
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