Partnerships and Incubators
U.S. and EU countries are opening offices in Eastern Europe at a rapid pace, partnering with local software firms, and establishing research labs in the region. Partnering with a local firm solves a lot of the cultural and linguistic and legal problems, or at least internalizes them.
But there are other models. Open-source development, for instance. Open-source development spans international borders more easily than proprietary software, for a number of obvious reasons. The fact that a large part of the development team for MySQL is in Eastern Europe is due not to any recruiting effort or salary differential, but just to the fact that Eastern European programmers contribute to open-source projects in disproportionate numbers.
Globally distributed companies are a step beyond the globally distributed development model often characteristic of open-source software. Sun's NetBeans operation is such a globally distributed operation, and there are many more, sometimes powered by what Dr. Dobb's 2007 Excellence in Programming award winner Grady Booch calls "new development environments that support interactions between geographically disparate stake holders." In NetBeans' case, that would be CollabNet.
Partnering takes on many forms, and frequently Western firms are tapping Eastern European talent not just for cookie-cutter coding but also for key development and R&D work. Few know how dependent Intel is on Eastern European talent for key Intel products. CA recently opened a mainframe development center in Prague. IBM opened a software lab in Krakow, its first in Eastern Europe. And of course so, did Google. Motorola, too. Microsoft, Sun, Deutsche Telecom, and others have opened labs in other Eastern European countries near universities to grab new grads. California-based aBeam Technologies outsources R&D to Russia. MultiMetrix, a California company founded by Russian émigrés, hires Russian programmers. Based in Santa Clara, eASIC has R&D operations in Romania.
