IT outsourcing to Western Siberia

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Calculate your Customer Focus
2008-03-06 18:19:00
There are many companies which are posting content on their web sites saying "We can ...", "We are the best", etc. They describe how good they are but they do not explain, why a customer should use their services or products. In contrary, fortunately, there are companies which are interested to explaining, what their customer will get by using their services. They usually say "You will ...", "You can ..." and other phrases including words "you". I believe this is one of the main factors to be a customer-focused company.How customer-oriented are you?I've just found an interesting utility which allows to measure customer focus of your web content. The tool calculates number of self-oriented words "I", "we", company name and the number of words "you", "your". And they tell you a rate of your customer orientation basing on these two numbers. Good rate is 60%-70%. This is the link.I have calculated customer focus rates for this blog: it is 75% which is excellent result ;)So please feel ...
More About: Customer , Focus , Calculate

Outsourcing vendor selection utility
2008-02-28 08:53:00
Outsourcing Mentor has released a free utility which can help to choose the right outsourcing vendor.Application asks you to prioritize your expectations from a vendor by walking through a list of questions and finally draws a graph representing importance of the 4 main factors in outsourcing for you:QualityRiskStrategyCostAfter looking at the graph it will be easier for you to narrow down a list of possible offshore vendors to a much smaller size and identify exactly those companies which will meet your expectations in outsourcing.Here is the link to download the application. You can download it and start "OM_ApplicationSupportOutsourcingMentor.e xe" if you encounter any issue with usual setup.
More About: Outsourcing , Utility , Selection

Outsourcing vendor: a company vs a freelancer
2008-02-27 17:25:00
The common choice which is to be made when you search for an offshore software development vendor is: "Whom to choose - an outsourcing company or a freelancer?". As a primary advantage of outsourcing is lower cost, clients, especially new to outsourcing, usually choose freelancers as their services are cheaper. But they often get a negative experience of such type of outsourcing. So what should a client consider deciding on an outsourcing vendor? Project Management Project Management services Communicating and coordinating work of a single freelancer can be easy, but when your team grows to 3 or more freelancers it becomes very time-consuming to synchronize their work, make everyone working on separate tasks and then integrate results of their work. Company , on the contrary, provides project manager for a development team, who is coordinating their work in a professional way, tracking timeline, budget, other project parameters and delivering results to you. Companies use establi...
More About: Outsourcing , Freelancer

Russia is on the top by IT market growth
2008-02-20 07:49:00
London Business School and LEGG have indicated that Russia is on the top of "resource and efficiency driven economy" countries.Russia has been assigned score of 6.11 which indicates high level of connectivity technologies used in business, government and consumers. This particularly implies wide use of information technologies and, thus, growth of IT market.Russia is experiencing growth of IT market rates as about 20% annually and the market volume is expected to be $17 bln in 2007.You can see original report here.
More About: Market , Growth

Using RSS and Yahoo Pipes for handling of job listings
2008-02-08 08:24:00
ISS Art gets part of its customers from online marketplaces such as oDesk, Elance, GetAFreelancer and others.It can take a very long time to walk through lots of projects listed on those sites and choose the ones which are interesting for us. We choose projects basing on the budget (ISS Art is focused on mid-to-large sized projects) and technologies involved (we choose projects depending on availability of our software developers specializing in required technologies).Most of such web sites provide RSS channels to get a list of projects. So the first thing we did is added RSS feeds of those sites to our Google Reader account. It is easier and much faster to walk through brief descriptions of projects and look at detailed descriptions only for those which match our basic requirements for budget and technologies.Recently Yahoo has released beta version of the Yahoo Pipes service, which is I'd say revolutionary in the world of Web 2.0 and programmable web. I got an idea of using this ...
More About: Listings , Yahoo pipes , Yahoo!

Why rates of reliable offshore companies are not so low?
2007-11-26 11:02:00
What is the price of offshore software development services? Everyone knows that the goal of outsourcing is decreasing expenses.So many companies searching for outsourcing vendors are looking for very low prices and wondering, why only very small offshore companies without any reputation offer such prices. If they choose such small companies without recognition, they are wondering again because their first projects fail.Why does this happen and why is it not a good idea to search for vendor at a very low price? And what is the good price to choose in the software development outsourcing services market?Steve Mezak in his article http://www.stevemezak.com/?p=27 mentioned a good point: working at very low price causes win-lose relationship which will anyway result in some sort of troubles. Troubles may be: high attrition rates, low skills, etc.Working with OSP on rates, which are lower than onshore, but not significantly is a win-win relation which is interesting for both sides so it ...
More About: Companies , Offshore , Rates

How to find a reliable vendor for software development outsourcing?
2007-11-19 15:14:00
About the problemThe problem of finding the right offshore company to outsource IT or software development work to it is unfortunately very common. There are thousands of offshore software development companies all over the world: in India, Russia, Ukraine, China, Latin America, etc, but which one to choose for your project? And a more complex question, how to choose not to fail? Most probably you heard from your business partners, friends and saw in the web many failure stories about outsourcing. Money saving is attractive (you may save 50% of project cost or even more), but what if money will be wasted and you will get software with very bad quality or even will not get any software. There are stories over web like someone has spent $300000 during 6 months and did not get any result from his outsourcing vendor.Many executives or VP, Engineering use the following method: they just open Google and enter keywords of required technologies or industries, and go through the list of vend...
More About: Software , Outsourcing , Software Development , Development , Find

Russian Government plans to reduce taxes for IT-exporters
2007-11-09 13:49:00
Here is a link to a good news for many Russian IT companies, exporting services to foreign countries. It will not affect small companies with less than 100 employees and income less than $800K, because they already have reduced tax scheme (called simplified tax scheme). But for mid-size and large companies and also for small but quickly growing companies this law will open very good perspectives.ISS Art is a small (80 employees), but quickly growing company, we are close to the upper limit of the current reduced tax scheme and if the law has effect, it will open us great opportunities for us to grow.By the way, the original text of the article is in Russian, I used Google Translate service to translate into English. I like the quality of translation. Most of Russian->English translators produced very poor quality. Thanks to Google, we look forward to seeing improved quality of their translators!
More About: Government , Taxes , Plans , Reduce

What is a good project for ISS Art?
2007-11-09 13:07:00
I mentioned a term "a good project" in my previous post. It does not sound client-oriented, so I would like to clarify what it means.Here are two factors:Every service provider company can be associated with projects which it CAN do. Can do in terms of technical things and deadlines. This means that if a company starts working on such project, the project will be successfully completed and the client's expectation will be completely satisfied.And every service provider associates itself with projects which it CAN do, but DOES NOT WANT to do. Does not want to do because of low budget or other reasons preventing business development of the company.Please take into account that the second type of projects is a part of the first type. There is also the third type of projects, projects which company CAN'T do because of technical reasons. If the company decides to work on such project, in most cases project will be failed. So let's consider only projects which the company CAN do to sat...
More About: Project , Good

A couple of words about myself or... CV
2007-11-09 07:57:00
I was born in Omsk, Russia. It is located in cold Western Siberia. Actually it is not so cold here in summer - temperature often reaches about 85-100 °F. And by the way there are no bears on our roads ;) I still live in Omsk, because I really like this city.I am some kind of a geek, who was been interested mostly in technical things in the childhood. I was very strong in Mathematics, Physics and Computers, took part in many various contests, won good places in regional and country-wide competitions in these technical subjects.While studying during last year of high school and 3 first years of university, I worked as a software engineer in one of small companies in Omsk. Its specialization was creation of hardware devices for oil and gas industry. I got most of my programming skills there, much more than university tried to give me, and I've understood that I'm a practical man.My family developed patriotism in me in my childhood, so I connected it with my love to all technical thi...
More About: Words , Couple

Ta-da!
2007-11-09 07:45:00
Great, now I have a blog in blogger.com. I plan to use it for expressing my thoughts related to my professional activities and discussing them with other people all over the world.