Our development centers are situated in Kharkiv (Ukraine). Total area of office quarters exceeds 1000 м². Hardware facilities include 150+ development workstations and 20 servers. Offices are connected to 6Mbit Internet channel. Our infrastructure enables us to carry out projects of any complexity fully at our site or at customer’s site as well. Our geographical location provides us with a number of unique opportunities, which make significant input to our strength. The main advantages are :

• High-skilled IT community. Kharkiv is one of the major centers of education and science intensive industry of the former USSR. According to the information of American University “... The city of Kharkiv is home to a number of good technical universities, and some refer to the city as the Silicon Valley of Eastern Europe. In Soviet times, Kharkiv was a major center of education and technology... The area’s computer specialists, however, were some of the first to work for Western clients...” Here is a home of about 20 state high institutions and 10 private ones “...with a combined enrollment of over 100,000 students”. High education traditions founded as early as XIX century are highly honoured today here. Number of high technical institutions educate thousands experts in natural sciences, military industry, aviation and space technologies, and Information Technologies. Local IT specialists master all technical skills required for new software development and for migration from legacy platforms.
  
  
• Fundamental education. Unlike in other offshoring centers (e.g. India and South-East Asia) education of Ukrainian IT specialists is of fundamental character. As a rule graduates from Ukrainian universities possess high skills in software engineering, software development lifecycle, system analysis, discrete and computational mathematics, artificial intelligence and other Computer Science domains. Many engineers come to IT from applied mathematics and mathematical physics as disciplines very close to IT. That is why Ukrainian IT people demonstrate excellent results in solution of complex programming problems that require creative approach, advanced logic thinking and expertise in adjacent domains. As well they are good in project management, research and creation of new technologies, business process analysis, system architecture design, and quality assurance.
• Readiness for complicated projects. Soviet system was famous for its school and practice of large-scale projects especially in military and space. Ukrainian IT-industry inherited these traditions and combined them with up-to-date Western achievements in IT process engineering.
  
• Common culture and no language barrier. In modern Ukraine you will hardly face a problem of misunderstanding caused by cultural or language differences. “...geography and centuries long tradition place it[Ukraine] firmly in Europe. Today’s young and middle age managers and specialists who work in hi-tech companies have the same or higher levels of education, English language skills and motivation as their European colleagues“¹.
  
• Time zone and accessibility. Ukraine (in particular its capital city Kyiv) is approximately 2 to 2.5 hours from the major Western European capitals. So our business time is very close to European and allows continuously staying in touch. For the USA, Ukraine is 5-7 hours ahead of Eastern Coast and 10 hours ahead of Western Coast. Coordination of work schedule allows to overlapping and communicating between the two locations on-line or via phone. This way the work is handed off at the end of the day and at the beginning of the next US business day can be already reviewed and accepted. Phrase “Оk, this feature will be ready before you get to the office tomorrow” is very popular in communication between project manager in Kharkiv and US side. If customers are interested to visit our site in order to discuss potential projects or to coordinate during the project cycle they are able to do it with ease. Air communication with Europe is regular and flights are arriving to Kyiv almost daily. Moreover, Austrian Airlines proposes regular communication from Vienna directly to Kharkiv. This flight takes only 1.5 hour. Starting from 2005 Ukraine provides visa is not required for USA and Western Europe residents. All these factors open remarkable opportunities of doing business with us.

With respect to the points stated above Ukraine and in particular Kharkiv should be considered as most perspective target for IT offshoring. According to the latest international research, starting from 2000 we observe exponential grow of Ukrainian IT-export. Being one of the IT-outsourcing leaders NIX Solutions Ltd. makes significant contribution in this process.