OK
A financial software company
discovers a newfound faith in outsourcing.
EPAM SYSTEMS, KIEV, UKRAINE
PHOTOS BY RYAN DONNELL
Four years ago, Jonathan Meyer was ready to give up on outsourcing. The CTO of global finan- cial software provider Ipreo had tried outsourc- ing a few projects to India, with only marginal success.
Mr. Meyer had experimented with a well-known vendor, a small boutique vendor and even
a captive team of his own employees sent to
work in India.
But none of his projects delivered much value
because teams didn’t always want to write code
or build solutions. “It was always a struggle,”
he says.
Following an influx of employees and acquisitions, Mr. Meyer had to rethink his outsourcing
strategy. Several of the new hires hailed from
Eastern Europe and encouraged him to look in
that region for an IT vendor.
He was skeptical.
“In India, you know who the big vendors are,
but in Eastern Europe, I had no idea where to
begin,” he says.
A colleague suggested EPAM Systems, a
U.S.-based IT outsourcing services provider with
development teams across Central and Eastern
Europe.
First the outsourcing team had to prove it
knew how to handle security concerns around
sensitive financial data. “Security is of massive
importance to us,” Mr. Meyer says.
Technical skills weren’t enough, though—
Ipreo needed to be able to communicate effectively. The fact that senior team members spoke
English fluently boded well.
But the proof would ultimately come in the
results. Mr. Meyer gave EPAM a project to test
the waters: a sophisticated data-analysis tool
that his in-house team had already tried, and
failed, to build.
