In the outsourcing industry, where trust, reliability and credibility are a passport to success, establishing personal contacts during face-to-face meetings of customers and providers are essential. Quite a number of industry events which bring all its representatives together are held regularly all around the globe to facilitate discussions burning issues, experience sharing, and establishing new business relations.

The eighth annual Software Development Summit took place in St. Petersburg, Russia earlier this month. The focal point of the Summit was all the segments of software development industry combining export, internal market, IT outsourcing, licensed products. More than 150 participants from Russia, Belarus, Germany, Italy, the USA, Finland, Ukraine attended the event. They all had a wonderful opportunity to present new projects done both for foreign and domestic companies, to discuss world business development tendencies. The problem of work force and its training was also given careful consideration to as qualification of company’s staff is one of the prerequisites for customer base expansion, reputation build-up, and market share enhancement in today’s highly competitive environment.

Among those who took the floor there was Peter Schumacher, the founder and president of Value Leadership Group who described the New Competitive Paradigm in the European IT services. One of the 4 strategic options for Russian offshore IT services firms presented by the speaker was developing alliance with India, which at the first glance seems quite an unusual scenario. Although there may be a couple of techniques Eastern Europe’s and Russia’s ITO providers could learn from them trying to combine their skills with India’s scope and scale.