Outsourcing to Ukraine: Reasons, Approaches, Benefits

This article lists multiple reasons to outsource certain aspects of your IT operations and the benefits the business can obtain from this approach. In addition, we explain the most compelling reasons for outsourcing to Ukraine.

Outsourcing is the natural choice for most of the businesses today, from startups to global enterprises. This allows concentrating resources on mission-critical business systems, like customer interactions and relations, billing, product promotion, etc. Quite the opposite, business workloads that require specific skills and technological background, like customer support, software development, infrastructure management, cybersecurity — these tasks are commonly outsourced to specialized companies, so-called Managed Services Providers.

There are three major approaches to delegating the workloads, united by the term of “outsourcing”: offshoring, insourcing and nearshoring.

• Insourcing is the approach to delegating new tasks to the company department that has relevant or similar experience. For example, when Xerox added new products to their lineage of offerings, the company just retrained the existing customer support reps to be able to support the new series of equipment.
• Nearshoring is the approach to delegating the tasks to a company in your country or your local area. The most common example is McDonalds hiring local logistics companies in every country where they open new branches of their restaurants, instead of maintaining their own fleet of trucks for delivering their supplies.
• Offshoring is hiring skilled professionals from another geographical location, as the price of living differs greatly across the globe, while the expertise your business needs can be obtained by multiple specialists in many countries. The most known example of this approach Microsoft hiring multiple customer support representatives in English-speaking countries across the globe to provide services to their customers, as well as hiring Spanish-speaking support in Mexico for South American countries.

While these three approaches differ a lot, they are united by the business logic: the company always tries to minimize its expenses while obtaining the best service possible. It is a fact that hiring skilled web and mobile software developers, DevOps engineers, Big Data architects, and system administrators in the US and EU is quite expensive. This lead to appearance of multiple IT outsourcing hubs around the world, Eastern Europe and Ukraine being the most popular one at the moment.

Reasons to outsource to Ukraine

There are multiple IT outsourcing regions across the globe, spread according to the dominating language, cultural fit, time zone overlapping between the customer and the contractor, and specialization. Ukraine has gained its reputation as a trustworthy IT outsourcing destination due to a variety of reasons:

• Good cultural fit with the EU and US customers, as we all share the same values, calendar and business paradigms of responsibility, quality of services and transparency
• Fluent spoken and written English for the majority of companies in Ukraine, as its educational system is quite good and there are lots of affordable opportunities to master English for all the IT professionals and other staff.
• Overlapping time zones, as Ukrainian GMT+2 time coincides or overlaps with the majority of European work hours, at least partly. For the US customers, we usually have a couple of overlapping hours a day, which enables IT outsourcing companies in Ukraine to do most of the tasks overnight.
• Ukraine is a powerful IT industry hub, with good higher education and nearly a hundred of universities across the country, producing dozens of thousands of new IT technology specialists annually, in addition to multiple courses and training centers, where software developers and infrastructure engineers can improve their skills.

This combination of factors leads to the fact that multiple companies from Ukraine are listed in various prominent international ratings, like Ease of Doing Business, Bloomberg Innovation Index, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, PWC reports, Forrester Wave ang Clutch technology ratings.

More than a hundred of players of IT outsourcing market in Ukraine earned their way to the tops of aforementioned ratings and improve their positions year over year. More than 100 R&D centers for global corporations in gaming, software development, aerial transportation, consumer electronics, energy industry, home appliances and other industries are situated in Ukraine. Many of these companies have the status of Managed Services Providers, meaning they do not specialize in one area, but can provide a wide range of services, from web/mobile app design and development to DevOps services, Big Data analytics implementation, cloud infrastructure optimization, cloud monitoring and much, much more.

IT outsourcing in Ukraine: IT Svit approach

Time and again it was proved that a contractor with lots of experience knows better what NEEDS to be done in order to enable what customer WANTS. Thus said, many of Ukrainian IT service providers have decades of expertise in delivering various types of software development and infrastructure management services, and can cover any requests of our customers, meeting and exceeding their expectations.

IT Svit is a Managed Services Provider and one of the leaders of IT outsourcing market in Ukraine with ample experience in providing a full cycle of services to businesses of various sizes, from startups to global enterprises. We were founded in 2005 and over 14+ years of operations grew to a team of 60+ professionals gained immense expertise in various domains:

• Managed DevOps services
• AWS and GCP cloud administration
• cloud infrastructure optimization
• cloud operations monitoring, logging and smart alerting
• Big Data analytics implementation
• Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms training and deployment
• Blockchain app and infrastructure development
• CRM/HRM/HRIS platform development and QA
• MVP design and development

Due to such variety of expertises we are able to provide full cycle of services for businesses of any size, from small startup teams to global corporations. Over 800 successfully accomplished projects of the widest scope resulted in a huge codebase of turnkey solutions for most common challenges faced by the companies on various stages of their product lifecycle. This, and ample expertise of our software engineers helps reduce the time-to-market for your products, optimize the cloud infrastructure and workflows in use, ensure maximum performance and cost-efficiency of your IT operations.

This is what a standard IT Svit project looks like:

1. When the customer contacts us and explains what they WANT done, we clarify the project details during a technical call with our PMs and Team Leads, who can understand what NEEDs to be done to reach the project objectives.
2. We come up with a plan on how to achieve the project goals in the most quick and cost-efficient manner and make an offer to the customer. If the scope of work, deadlines and budget meet the customer expectations, we sign the contract and begin working.
3. We assess the existing infrastructure, workflows and tools in use and identify possible performance bottlenecks and room for growth, based on the input from your company stakeholders and developer documentation.
4. Once we grasp the way your IT infrastructure operates, we come up with the solutions on how to remove bottlenecks and optimize your systems to ensure security, scalability, manageability and meeting the project goals.
5. We implement said solutions to ensure the infrastructure is as performant and cost-efficient as possible, based on the project budget and goals.
6. We accomplish the project, with regular reports to keep you informed on the progress and implement your feedback at once.
7. We can provide ongoing infrastructure support and product updates, should you decide to form a long-term partnership.

Thus said, this approximate roadmap changes based on the project specs, but the general logic of the operations remains the same.

Benefits of IT outsourcing to Ukraine

We briefly mentioned before about the benefits of IT outsourcing to Ukraine. Most companies go for cost savings, but there are actually much more advantages of outsourcing:

1. Instant access to top-skill talents. Highly experienced software engineers are hard to come by on the job market, as they are never unemployed for long. Besides, they demand high wages, and it undermines the very idea of cost-reduction due to IT outsourcing. Quite the contrary, MSPs usually have teams of skilled software engineers, due to the reasons we describe below.
2. Accomplished R&D expertise. Improvement is impossible without experimentation, and some experiments might result in mistakes. Nobody wants to pay money for something that results in a failure, of course. This is why working with accomplished teams that have decades of experience behind their back is so good — all the R&D work was done on previous projects and paid for by previous customers.
3. Ready turnkey solutions. This is a logical consequence of the previous point, as the team that does dozens of similar projects over the years naturally has ready turnkey solutions that solve typical challenges. This greatly reduces the risks and time-to-market for your project.
4. Wide variety of skills. Working with a DevOps team is much better than hiring a single DevOps engineer in-house, as you get access to a large pool of skills. Naturally, you can invest time and effort in training your in-house talents, but offshoring the project to a dedicated DevOps team means instant access to a large pool of skills from the beginning of the project.
5. Mutually beneficial partnership. Nobody likes routine, and DevOps engineers value variety as much as any other specialist. Working at MSP allows them to engage on various projects and master new tools and technology rapidly, instead of dealing with the same outdated tooling and legacy infrastructure. This is a win-win situation, where you get your project delivered using the latest and best tools available, and MSP team gets experience and moves to the next project before they are stuck in the routine.
6. No hard feelings. IT outsourcing is a limited-time service, like going to a barbershop to get a haircut. A professional will get the job done, you pay for the services and leave, everyone is happy. You do not have to fire them after the project completion, as you did not hire them in the first place. And if you liked the results — you will come back to this team for your next haircuts… ot IT projects.

Thus said, IT outsourcing to Ukraine provides much more than just cost reduction. You get instant access to a large pool of professionals with good English, who can provide the full range of services you need at affordable price and deliver high-quality products and services on time. In addition, you might get more than you expected out of such partnership, as multiple IT Svit projects showcase.

Case 1: DevOps for Preterion

Preterion is an Australian cloud/web development integrator, who contacted IT Svit with some minor task, like a website redesign. As the job was done, the customer asked if we could deploy the website — and we did it. It further turned out that we could do literally any task they assign to us — from cloud infrastructure management for their customers, to building CI/CD pipelines for software updates for various other projects. Preterion was able to reduce their expenses by nearly 30%, take on much more complicated projects with bigger budgets and reduce their ticket processing time by 50%, thanks to our diligent technical support service.

Case 2: Microservices for Skillbyte

Skillbyte came to us with a request to optimize the process of installing the showcase of their cloud-based enterprise-grade CRM system. We ended up moving the platform from Mesos/Marathon/Packer to Kubernetes/Docker, splitting the monolith app to microservices and configuring highly-scalable cloud deployments by simple Terraform manifests. This shortened the system setup time from 3 hours to 15 minutes and helped the customer sell more than 100 copies of the system to European enterprise business.

Case 3: Full-stack development for Yallabit

Yallabit is a Kuwaiti-based fiat-cryptocurrency exchange. The customer contacted us with a minor backend configuration request, but quickly understood we are more technically sound than their current contractors. We were able to hit the ground running, optimize the platform operations in production and ongoing updates and currently provide full-stack development and infrastructure management for the customer, who quickly gains popularity on the Gulf startup scene.

Final Thoughts on IT outsourcing to IT Svit

We are a reliable partner able to deal with projects of varying scope. The quality of our services is proven by multiple positive IT Svit customer reviews on various platforms, and many of our customers refer their colleagues and friends to us. We can provide almost every IT service your company needs and are always ready to assist. Should you want to outsource your next project to a reliable team — let us know, we are always ready to assist!