The Benefits of Outsourcing Software Development to Poland
Nine reasons why you should outsource the development to a professional software house in Poland
Let’s face it — outsourcing of services, like manufacturing, customer service or software development is nothing new as it has become a standard business practice for hundreds of companies nowadays, both large and small ones.
Numerous corporations, including the largest global players in tech, IT, retail and several other industries, have been outsourcing their software development and engineering work to external partners in Central Europe, especially in Poland.
Developers population of Central & Eastern Europe (thousands)
In fact, Poland has repeatedly been ranked by recognized analysts, like AT Kearney’s and Tholons, as the top European country for software development outsourcing. The Polish city of Krakow was placed in the Tholons Top 10 index of outsourcing destinations as the only European location.
Since joining the European Union in 2004, Poland has benefited economically from opening the borders as well as from and a massive flow of investments which has connected the country to larger markets in Europe and worldwide.
Cities with the biggest population of developers
Within a decade Poland has emerged as a regional leader in outsourced IT and BPM services with its three cities (Warsaw, Wroclaw and Krakow) as major hubs in the provision of these value added services.
A large pool of skilled IT workforce (arguably the largest in Central Europe), relatively low wages and cost of doing business, geographical location in close proximity to major West European markets — all of these have made Poland an ideal near-shoring and off-shoring software development partner.
So, other than for macroeconomic reasons, why should you move your software development to a partner in Poland?
Here are nine compelling reasons for you to consider.
Advantage #1 — Quality Education
Polish software developers are among the best in the world, educated at leading Polish universities widely recognized for running STEM education programs at a very high level. What’s more, leading software and tech companies actively develop students’ skills through internships and scholarships. As a result, IT students graduate already having significant practical experience and impressively diverse skills.
Advantage #2 — A Large and Deep Talent Pool
Poland is home to approximately 25% of Europe’s IT professionals with an estimated 30 000 ICT students graduating every year from over 500 universities in Poland. Six of those universities have been ranked in the prestigious QS World University Rankings® 2018, largely thanks to high education standards maintained for decades.
Advantage #3 — Experience and Innovation
Thanks to extensive internship programs, numerous hackathons, meetups and workshops held by companies and major tech hubs, IT students in Poland start coding much earlier than their peers in most other countries, according to Stack Overflow.
Polish developers are also known to be creative and innovative, regularly winning numerous international competitions held by Google, Microsoft and others. Such opportunities to gain practical experience and start working even before graduation make Polish developers some of the most valuable specialists in the business.
Advantage #4 — Modern and Reliable Infrastructure
A growing economy, large inflows of funding from the European Union and significant investments in developing the country’s telecommunications infrastructure have transformed Poland into a modern IT ecosystem over the past three decades.
These days internet service providers and telco operators in Poland offer reliable services of much higher quality than most of their counterparts in the US or even in the largest European countries. The internet access is ubiquitous and reliable, and so is the mobile phone and mobile internet coverage.
All that creates a stable and reliable work environment for IT professionals.
Advantage #5 — Convenient Geographical Location
Located in Central Europe, with a time difference of only one hour to the GMT zone, Poland is conveniently placed to service recipients from the US, Europe and APAC. In fact, numerous American companies are already using Poland-based companies as their off-shore IT team extensions or software development partners. In fact, we are one of these Poland-based companies and can confirm that the communication with our international clients always goes smoothly, irrespective of their location.
The time difference of 6–9 hours with the US and 6–8 hours “the other way” with Australia makes it relatively easy for American and Australian companies to work with their Poland-based IT teams on an on-going basis.
Advantage #6 — Solid Data Security
As a member of the EU Poland is bound by its strict regulations on data security and data privacy, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). All software developing vendors follow mandatory data protection procedures meant to ensure the data is safely and reliably stored, in order to minimize the risk of cybercrime. In fact, according to Symantec, Poland has one of the lowest cybercrime records in the world.
These factors are especially important for companies managing data-sensitive businesses.
Advantage #7 — Effective and Easy Communication
Historically, Poland has always included major foreign languages, like English, German and French in its mainstream education programs. Thanks to educational reforms, open borders and increased access to international language training sources, the language proficiency in Poland has steadily improved in the past three decades.
Today Poland is ranked 9th in Europe (of 33 countries) by EF English Proficiency Index with a “very high proficiency” score.
Virtually all IT professionals operate in English language-oriented business enviornment, as most companies in Poland (including ours) now expect their employees to communicate fluently in English.
Communicating with your Polish development team and their management in English is thus much easier than with some of the Asian vendors, especially when you consider that Poland is culturally and mentally much closer to European, American and Anglo-Saxon mindsets.
Advantage #8 — Global IT Standards
Project management methodologies, like Agile and SCRUM, along with all the newest technologies are widely used by software houses and developers in Poland.
Being one of the largest IT and software service forces in Europe, Poland naturally attracts a lot of businesses from foreign companies which expect the highest professional standards to be followed by their contractors. Polish software houses are thus at the sharp end of applying global IT standards in their project work, which is yet another factor making them attractive outsourcing partners.
Advantage #9 — Relatively Low Development Costs
Finally, software development costs in Central and Eastern Europe are lower than the rates charged in the US for similar work, often by as much as 30%-50%, depending on individual customer requirements.
For the above-mentioned reasons, Polish IT companies and software houses offer by far the highest quality of software development and engineering work among Central European countries. While being significantly cheaper than their competitors in Scandinavia, UK or the US, they make a perfect service provider for companies of all sizes and locations.
Characteristics of Web Development in Poland
Summary
Of all the countries offering software development services Poland is by far the most advanced. Offering the highest quality solutions at reasonable rates, produced by highly educated and uniquely skilled workforce, Polish software developers should be seriously considered by companies looking to outsource some or all of their software engineering work.
Digital Colliers is one of such young and dynamically growing companies, a team of full-stack web developers providing development services to customers worldwide.
Click here to contact Digital Colliers for a free consultation.
