HP opens R&D Lab in Russia, St. Petersburg

Hewlett-Packard recently announced that the company is going to open an R&D Lab in St. Petersburg, Russia. The official opening will take place on January 22nd and HP is planning to ramp-up about 40 software engineers in the first year of operations. The Russian Research and Development Center will focus on Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Mining technologies.

HP has a long history of operations on the Russian IT market, but software development in Russia is a fairly new game for Hewlett-Packard. So, from the year 2006 "HP Labs Russia" in St. Petersburg will join the network of HP development centers. At the moment HP runs R&D centers in Palo-Alto, Bristol, Haifa, Tokyo, Bangalore and Peking.

HP has decided to open up in St. Petersburg due to a number of factors; the level of wages and the availability of highly educated software engineers are among the few most compelling reasons behind this Russian software development debut.