Mircea, Frédéric and I spent a few days in Poland last week in an attempt to find a nearshoring solution designed to accelerate our development in Germany and Austria. We made some interesting discoveries in this country: high-level training, a large number of students, a great deal of whom speak German (at least when compared to Romania), professional interlocutors who are all very good English speakers, a highly dynamic economic environment.

In Wroclaw, 700,000 inhabitants, the country’s 4th largest city, 700 IT & Management graduates of the Polytechnic University enter the labour market each year, in addition to the one thousand graduates of the Faculty of Electronics (telecommunications, hardware specializations etc.). The University of Wroclaw even has its own incubator which has supported the launch of no less than 130 start-ups during the last 8 years! The city hosts a Nokia Siemens Networks R&D center which employs 1,500 people (the largest in Europe), not to mention the presence of players such as Volvo IT, IBM, Google etc. That is impressive… In Warsaw, Samsung has recruited 400 young graduates from the Faculty of Electronics and IT in less than 3 years. The partnership policy of the university in relation to the business world efficiently prepares its students for their entry on the labour market, through the work carried out for example in a laboratory created together with the local branch of Germany’s T-Mobile.

As Fred explains it in his article, nearshore outsourcing providers tend to draw closer to their clients, geographically speaking, in order to better understand and get involved in their strategy and fields of expertise. Within this context, speaking the same language is all the more important and justifies higher prices in countries like Poland or the Czech Republic. Administrative easiness (Poland is a member of the Schengen area), which allow Polish engineers to carry out missions on site in the German speaking area, is another reason why Germans are willing to pay a higher price. Actually, the obvious cultural proximity sometimes gave me the impression I was in Germany. And it may very well be that there are French speakers in this country, as well.

You will therefore have understood: Pentalog was rather seduced by the Polish alternative in terms of nearshore outsourcing. Certain elements are still to be analyzed in more detail, but in a few weeks we should be able to make a choice between a first Polish office and a fifth office in Romania, which could also join the Schengen area in 2011… We have therefore embarked on a new Eastern-European adventure

Wroclaw by night:

Some additional pictures here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=20024&id=100001194624591&l=98f740dc6f