Eastern Europe is really profitable region for software development, nearshoring and offshoring. In fact, this region is even better from the point of view of nearshoring than United States or Western Europe. This situation occured because of strict development of Eastern Europe in terms of business. The software industry in the countries of this region is strictly developing and at the moment East European market is larger than the market in any of the developed countries.
But it would be a huge mistake to consider Eastern Europe as the next nearshoring target, such as India in outsourcing. The situation which has happened with the region is quite different and unique.
There are a lot of factors which are making the region of Eastern Europe of great interest. We can compare this region with Western Europe because the companies of Western region have already had some experience in offshoring.
It is well-known how is it important to have programmers near you. One of the biggest challenges is working with vendor who are quite far from you. That is why it may occur such a problem as working long because time zone of your vendor strictly conflicts with your time zone. Nearshoring software operations will make easier co-operation with programming teams, because they will be located geographically close to you and they will have almost the same culture prejudices. The latter will help you to avoid difference in culture and difficulties in the knowledge of various languages. That is why nearshoring of Eastern Europe is the solution of almost all problems of Western European companies in case if Eastern salaries will be comparable to those in offshore locations like India.
If we are talking about Eastern Europe it is very important to define the countries of the region. It should include Poland, Russia, Belarus, then goes Slovakia, Moldova, Czech Republic and countries which are bordering with Black Sea - it is Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. Almost all this countries are developing countries. This fact makes Eastern Europe good target for nearshoring and outsourcing.
One of the best countries for the beginning of nearshoring is Czech Republic, because this country now have really good engineering education, high-quality math, motivated labor pool with professional standards and favorable labor costs. However, according to the reports of nearshoring specialists for Western European countries, for example for Finland, one of the best targets are Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Hungary.
There are a lot of cultural, political and linguistic differences between the countries of Western and Eastern Europe. However, all the countries are quite successful in business, especially in software development, that is why we can suppose that the co-operation is quite possible and it will face many difficulties in the future but the reasults also will be amasing.