BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

18/06/2007

Exigen Services starts recruiting developers in Minsk

Exigen Services, one of the biggest IT service providers in Central and Eastern Europe, has opened a development center in Minsk. The group is planning to hire up to 100 software engineers within a year's time.

In February 2007 Exigen Services merged with StarSoft, a large outsourcing company that employs around 600 developers. The opening of a development center in Belarus has become a new stage in the group's business development.

The integration of the two businesses - Exigen and StarSoft - is under way now. The projects run independently by the two companies have been partly distributed between their offices. The new Belarus-based development center is originally designed to serve the whole group's needs accomplishing projects for a number of American and European customers.

Prior to the merger, both Exigen and StarSoft had a geographically distributed structure of production divisions that both companies managed successfully. Exigen's main development center was located in Riga, Latvia and had branches in Odessa, Ukraine and Vilnius, Lithuania. StarSoft was originally based St. Petersburg. Then it opened offices in Kazan, Dubna (Moscow Region) and Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine).

The group is currently busy looking for qualified staff in Russia's regions. Those were mostly invited to work in St. Petersburg. For a number of reasons, it was decided not to bring the developers from Belarus over to Russia. The immigration formalities are a major obstacle. Besides, unlike many Russian cities, Minsk has acceptable infrastructure, good higher education institutions and a more favorable situation in the labor market.

According to industry association Russoft, the average developers's salary has grown 1.5 times in Russia over the past year reaching $1,850 in Moscow, $1,400 in St. Petersburg and around $900 in the Russian regions. The labor market is overheated and many St. Petersburg and Moscow software companies are searching the regions to make up for at least part of personnel deficit.

Offers are mostly made to move to Moscow or St. Petersburg. Creating development centers in the regions is not often reasonable. Yet Exigen Services plans to open new offices in Russia, although no deadlines or locations have been determined yet. The agenda also includes expanding the Minsk office staff. Hiring 100 developers is only the plan for the first year.

Dmitriy Zhelvitsky

Computerworld Russia

Source:

http://www.ospint.com/text/d/4233421/