In an article “Why location matters to outsourcers“, Matthew Brunwasser of the International Herald Tribune makes some great points about Bulgaria.
See for your self:
The journalist writes, “But thanks to the country’s ongoing post-Communist economic transformation and recent developments in global business, Bulgaria has become a hotspot in a relatively uncharted niche of business process outsourcing called “near-shoring.”
Further he quotes my friend, John Hazlewood, chief executive of TravelStoreMaker.com, an online travel agency with a call center and software development operations in the country, who says, “Training is the same everywhere, but culture is important for communications. Bulgaria is much closer to the Western business mentality than China or India.”
According to the government’s Invest Bulgaria Agency, around 33 call centers have opened in Bulgaria since 2001. Around 3,600 people are currently working in the sector and the numbers are increasing. More than 17,000 people work in the software industry in Bulgaria and 31,000 in information technology as a whole, according to the international technology consultant IDC, which expects these numbers to continue to grow.
Bulgaria’s position was aided by Hewlett-Packard’s move this year to create a 1,000-person “global delivery center” in Sofia to provide remote technical services and support for its clients in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
More projects are in the pipeline.
In July, a Microsoft senior vice president, Eric Rudder*, announced that the software giant would open a customer service and technical support center in Sofia for its customers in southeastern Europe within the next year.
A Google vice president, Vinton Cerf, told a gathering of information technology professionals in Sofia in July that a team from the search engine company had visited Bulgaria looking at sites.*
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I hope that these companies will come soon to Bulgaria – to establish their offices, to dedicate people, resources and funding in creative Bulgarians.
Read the whole article at the IHT.
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* – Eric and Vint were in Sofia on the same days – July 3 and July 4.