Two students from St. Petersburg State Universities have won the first prize at the 16th International Mathematics Competition, held in Budapest. Alexey Levin and Vladislav Volkov, the first students to represent St. Petersburg in the three-day contest, were competing against other students from over 40 universities including Cambridge, Oxford and Princeton.

The Higher Mathematics Department at St. Petersburg State University is a major source of programmers and analysts for the city’s software development centers. Reksoft also contributes to the University programmes offering master classes and lectures of its IT experts and employs a large number of the Higher Mathematics Department graduates.

St.Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics emerged as the home of the top computer geniuses in the “Battle of the Brains,” also known as the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Collegiate Programming Contest.

From 6,700 teams representing 1,821 universities in 83 countries competing at 213 sites from September to December 2007 worldwide, one hundred teams managed to advance to the World Finals. Students from the world's finest universities, offering the best education in the computing sciences and engineering competed for the awards, prizes, scholarships as well as the prestigious title of the World Champion.

In the contest, each team is given 11 computer programming problems, and only five hours in which to write software to solve them. Students from St. Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics solved eight of the 11 problems and became the World Champion of 2008 ACM Competition.

The top 10 institutions of ACM Winners this year included Russian universities from Izhevsk, Moscow, Petrozavodsk and St.Petersburg (Izhevsk State Technical University, Moscow State University, Petrozavodsk State University, St. Petersburg State University), thus proving once again that Russia still scores the highest in the art of software programming. Reksoft is proud to sponsor the Russian team and warmly congratulates the winners!

TopCoder, Inc., the leader in online programming competition, skills assessment and competitive software development, held its annual competition for higher education students worldwide in November. This year the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge assembled the best and brightest technical students in the world in the premier event for software development collaboration and competition, and culminated with four intensive days of competition for the 120 top semi-finalists in a dynamic culminating event in Orlando, FL.

Representing 26 countries from around the world, 120 students flew to Disney World for the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge to compete live in the tournament's semifinals and the championship round on November 2nd at Disney's Contemporary Resort. Competitors qualified to be flown to the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge by earning a top global ranking in online qualifying rounds of competition involving more than 3,200 members earlier this summer. Five students achieved the title of TopCoder Collegiate Challenge Champion for 2007 and TopCoder Algorithm Competition Champion is Petr Mitrichev from Moscow State University.

Petr earned recognition as the fastest and most accurate coder, by solving word problems of increased difficulty through written software code and withstanding challenges by competitors seeking to crack, or break the code by finding bugs. It has been second year in a row that the Russian student becomes the winner of the TopCoder world championship.

Regular strong performance of Russian students at world's programming contests (ACM Championships, TopCoder Challenge) is an excellent proof of the brilliant engineering education system in the country which contributes a lot to the success of the Russian high-tech and ICT Industry.

Recently the Russian IT and Communications Ministry has reported that they will do everything possible to provide 95% of schools in the country with broadband Internet access in the new school year of 2007. This penetration level is set in the Ministry's plan endorsed by the Presidential Council for the implementation of the national priority projects and demographic policies.

The program also proposes a new software purchasing scheme. All schools will receive standard software set - both basics and modern office and graphics processing applications. By improving communication environment, Ministry expects a rise in hardware (primarily PC) sales next year.

At the 31st Annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, held in Tokyo, 88 student teams defended the right to be called the best programmers. We are proud to announce that St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics won the bronze medals. Other Russians also performed well - there are two other university teams in the top 10 ranking - Novosibirsk State University took the 6th place and Saratov State University - the 10th.

This achievement is even more impressive if one considers the following numbers: from 6,099 teams selected from 1,756 universities in 82 countries competing at 205 sites and hundreds more competing at preliminary contests worldwide, only 88 teams of students are selected to compete for bragging rights and prizes at finals.

Regular strong performance of Russian students at ACM Championships is an evident proof of the excellent engineering education system in the country which contributes a lot to the sucess of the Russian high-tech and ICT Indusry.

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.

Looking back over the year of the industry in-between ROSS 2005 and 2006, let’s see what kind of analytical coverage has Russian IT Export received? Nearly all of the key research agencies such as Forrester, Gartner Group, and IDC have included Russia into consideration set of attractive sourcing locations.

While the largest Russian outsourcing companies are well under way to clearly articulating the country’s competitive advantages and strategic positioning, the industry analysts have already stepped forward with their interim verdicts. This leaves the industry with the need to face the perceptions formulated, and realize where they might fit into the corporate strategies. Moreover, there are certain ideas ripe for picking by industrial buyers as well.

Researchers have identified some of the primary attributes of a generalized services proposition from Russia. When looking at them, one gets the feeling that the industry, in general, is quite immature (that holds true still, but is changing - see the "Russian IT Export: A View on the Annual Progress"). Therefore, most of the advantages are related to ‘the basics’ – the labor force (size, technical and linguistic skills, European culture, low attrition, low cost) and the overall attractiveness of location (infrastructure, domestic market, distance, stability). All these factors combined lead to a relatively low Total Cost of Engagement factor, especially in deals with Western Europe.

When it comes to the Top 10 outsourcing companies, the outlook is much brighter than it is for the industry in general. Russian players have managed to deliver strong messages and offerings that translated into major contracts signed and serious industrial benchmarks claimed, such as "The Top Offshoring Providers" and "Global Services 100".

Finally, the year 2005 was marked by a serious turnaround in the perception of IT infrastructure in Russia by B2B purchasers (this is especially true for major centers like Moscow, St. Petersburg and a number of other cities with population exceeding 1 million). A series of reports, including the well known AT&T research on Russian infrastructure, have destroyed the old and evil myth on problematic infrastructure in the country.

When it comes to talent sourcing, HRM in particular, there is harmony of unison in the voices of analysts and industry leaders:

"The Russian Federation offers a favorable economic environment, highly trained technical workers and excellent educational institutions," said Rod Adkins, Vice President of Worldwide Development, IBM Systems & Technology Group.

Pascal Matzke from Forrester Research:
Forrester sees several strong differentiators of Russia as application development sourcing destination. Those include the superbly educated engineering workforce of Russia, low attrition rate in Russia-based technology companies. He also mentioned good infrastructure and outstanding dynamics of the market.

IDC’s Barry Rubenstein pointed out a number of proven strengths of outsourcing to Russia and CEE. Among others, he named access to talented and still low-cost workforce, with superior engineering and scientific training, combined with grater economic and political stability in the region, and continued major investments into telecom and infrastructure. The availability of multilingual skills and low employee attrition, combined with Russia’s geographical positioning as the gateway to Eastern and Western Europe, and to emerging markets - topped off the list of outsourcing benefits.

Historically, the Russian IT Export industry evolved around the R&D and Application Development areas. That is true - since the early 90's, Russian companies are accumulating software development expertise in various domains. And now, this trend is recognized by the industry researchers - when it comes to Application Development, Russian companies should be considered first.

The Outsourcing Institute
"This expertise has allowed Russian companies to develop a strong skill set in solving large scale, complex technical problems. To help promote these and other capabilities, Russia is developing a stronger national software association".

Drawing strength on this foundation, Russia has grown into a major IT outsourcing player. This statement becomes even more lawful when Russia's share in the Nordics’ (mainly Denmark, Finland and Sweden) and Continental Europe’s direct offshoring market is reviewed. It is even more striking, when taking into account the fact that European companies have been quite slow in embracing the practice of offshoring. Russian vendors are going strong and Russia's Central and Western regions pretend to have become the destination of choice for European outsourcing.