The first step towards outsourcing software development is finding the perfect location, which requires a lot of thoughts and careful consideration of all available options.

Lately, we’ve noticed that Eastern Europe has risen as a competitor to even the largest Indian or Chinese companies, with decades of experience.  It is explained by the almost unnoticeable difference in hourly rates, nearly identical time-zones, and shared cultural values.

For many years India and Southern Asia have been the foremost outsourcing destinations for companies seeking to cut costs and access a plentiful talent pool.

A key reason as to why the EU has become so popular is that they provide a more cultural comfortable and time zone friendly environment for Western European countries and even the U.S

Countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Ukraine, and Latvia are becoming even more attractive due to their desire to improve the whole strategy and the company’s processes.

Furthermore, most of these countries are part of the European Union and this fact simplifies cooperation. They have a good education system, especially for technical professionals.

Here are some important facts about Eastern European developers:

  1. A recent report put together by Stack Overflow shows that in Central & Eastern Europe there are more than 1 million programmers.
  2.  According to the AT Kearney’s 2017 Global Services Location Index Romania, Ukraine, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Czech Republic are recounted in the top 25. The index has taken into consideration factors such as employees’ skills and time to deliver, financial attractiveness, and business conditions in 55 countries.
  3. Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, and Latvia are ranked highly in the top 50 of Bloomberg Innovation Index 2018.
  4. According to a report done by the World Bank Group and published under the name of Ease of Doing Business 2018 countries in Eastern European have shown major growth in the last few years. Poland has grown from 74th place to 27th place in 2018, Hungary – from 60th to 49th, Romania – from 71st to 45th, Doing Business uses 11 indicator sets to measure aspects of business regulation that matter for entrepreneurship.
  5. According to the EF English Proficiency Index 2017, Romania, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Poland,  have a high level of English skills.
  6. The 2015/2016 European IT Outsourcing Study – carried out by Whitelane Research, offers some key insights into the current progress of offshoring practices. The survey has placed Romania on the 3rd place in Europe and 13th globally when it comes to the progress of offshoring practices.

Multilingual capabilities (including English, German, French language skills) are more readily available in Eastern European countries rather than in India.

To make outsourcing even more attractive, governments in Eastern European countries have implemented tax incentives to simplify activities for IT companies.

Regardless of India and the Far East still being preferred for the inexpensive labor, Eastern Europe prevails in quality, reliability and data protection; showing that the importance of quality exceeds that of price and quantity.