It looks like the news of today was Oracle's opening of three Global IT and Technology Centres in Bucharest. As such there will be around 100 engineers working for this centers, and company's officials claim that the figure might reach 3-400 if business will develop according to their plans. The centers will serve the Western Europe clients, with staff from Ireland planned to relocate to Romania. Oracle claims that they also considered Turkey, Poland and the Czech Republic as possible locations but they decided for Romania "not only for the low cost of the workforce, but also for the number and quality of specialists". Hmmmm.

In the meantime, Siemens VDO Automotive AG, the automotive equipment division of Germany's largest engineering company, announced plans to double the number of software programmers it employs in Romania to help keep costs down. The company currently employs about 500 software programmers in Romania and plans an increase up to 1000 in the coming years.

What does this say?  I guess that in spite of the lack of the government promotion abroad for our IT skills, (about every Romanian IT company is complaining about) the big players begin to realize the advantages of cheaper labour force which provides a little extra (QUALITY) in comparison to their Indian counterparts. My guess is that in addition to serving better (read cheaper) this part of the world cultural differences may play an important role as well. Moreover, if we're to believe the diplomatic declarations from Oracle, Romania was chosen from 2 Eastern European countries and Turkey. Of course, one might argue that nowadays Turkey presents quite an unstable business environment besides the lack of tradition in the software industry while Polish and Czech labor became a bit more expensive as compared to the Romanian one (mainly because of their already admission to EU).

All in all, encouraging news and good examples for other multinationals to follow. The bothering thing is that critics might argue that their appearance in Romania was not a direct result of a governmental strategy but rather a ROI-based calculus when discussing budgets in the BOD. Of course this is a very difficult argument to quantify when making a point. Or maybe too trivial?

UPDATE: Siemens' move seems to be part of a global strategic intention of relocating some 15,000 programmers from US and Western Europe to India, China and Eastern Europe. More info here (registration required) via TJacobi.