Italian outsourcing company Comdata has leased 4,200 sqm of office space in the new mixed-use project developed by Romanian group River Development near the Bucharest Polytechnic University – The Light.
Comdata’s new multilinguistic customer management center in Bucharest will become operational in April 2020 and the lease covers a period of over 5 years, according to River Development.
The center will have about 400 employees, at first, who will serve multinational companies operating on multiple markets. Comdata wants to offer services in top European languages as well as in less circulated languages such as Scandinavian or Eastern European.“Multilingual services are a strategic priority for Comdata, and the demand from global companies has increased by 33% from 2018 to 2019. In Bucharest, we find a strong mix of European languages, with more than 20 languages spoken, many young speakers of foreign languages and a multicultural environment. The workforce in Bucharest has experience in both BPO and SSC (shared services centers), as frontline professionals, but also as managers,” said Andreas Milbert, Comdata’s Group Chief Operating Officer.
The Comdata center will be located in The Light One office building, with a leasable area of 21,653 sqm, which also has medical services operator Regina Maria among its tenants.
The Light mixed-use project, developed by River Development, a company controlled by Romanian investor Ion Radulea, will include three office buildings with a total area of 98,721 sqm and a residential compound with 196 apartments.

The European IT solution provider Cegeka opens a new office in Moldova. Five employees already work at the new location in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau. Cegeka intends to increase the number of employees to 200 in the coming years.
“The opening of the new Cegeka Service Center in Moldova will help us further grow our business in Eastern Europe. We see the new office in Chisinau as a local extension of our offices in Romania”, says Stijn Bijnens, CEO of Cegeka.
“In the coming years we want to recruit 200 people. We are looking for experts in software development, infrastructure management, cloud engineering, DevOps, automation engineering and data science ”, says Tom De Vos, Nearshore Director at Cegeka. “Cegeka is already an important employer in Romania today. We also want to become a popular employer in Moldova”, says Tom De Vos.
Cegeka has been active in Romania for more than 15 years and has at the moment more than 600 employees. “The opening of a new office in neighboring country Moldova means strengthening our footprint in the region. It also sustains our commitment to further develop Cegeka as a European company which stays close to its customers. The importance of this has grown further during the COVID-19 pandemic ”, explains Bijnens.
“Remote work has increased substantially in recent months due to the corona crisis. As a result, guiding companies remotely as well as from so-called nearshore locations has also become more common. The secure digital workplace that we use internally enables us to continue to offer support to our customers from nearshore locations,” concludes De Vos.
Cegeka is an European provider of IT solutions, including end-to-end application development services as well as IT team extension, Cloud services, IT infrastructure, data and automation services like Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Business Intelligence, RPA, IoT, DevOps. Cegeka helps its customers stay relevant in the digital environment, beyond digitalization and evolution in the cloud, offering solutions that have a real impact on customers’ business.
Cegeka has over 600 employees in Romania and Moldova, being present on the Romanian market since 2004, covering software development services and IT infrastructure.

rion Innovation, a leading digital transformation and product development services firm, and Tellence Technologies, a privately-held technology services company headquartered in Bucharest, Romania, have entered into a definitive agreement under which Orion will acquire Tellence.With this acquisition, Orion is strengthening its European presence by establishing an R&D operation in Romania, with associates across Bucharest and other major cities, as well as Tel Aviv, Israel. The Bucharest site will host more than 300 engineers, primarily focusing on Digital Product Development services for several global clients. The Romanian operation is expected to continue its rapid expansion, growing to over 1,000 engineers in the coming years.
Founded in 2012, Tellence develops and delivers cutting-edge technologies to companies in telecommunications and media, cyber security, and other industries. Tellence’s clients include emerging unicorns disrupting the telecommunications industry. The company has a history of strong growth over the past decade, serving as the trusted research and development partner to drive innovation for its clients and help them scale. 
“Tellence has a successful track record developing next-generation products for leading technology and telecommunications companies,” said Raj Patil, CEO of Orion. “They are at the forefront of the latest innovations. Adding Tellence’s talented engineering team to Orion brings our clients another layer of deep engineering expertise and forward-thinking innovation. Expanding across Europe is a key step in our aggressive growth strategy towards building a global digital transformation platform. Our new clients will benefit from Orion’s already strong product development expertise and broader digital transformation capabilities. I’m thrilled to welcome the Tellence team.”
Upon closing of the transaction, Tellence associates will become part of Orion’s Digital Product Development team. Efi Levinzon, Co-Founder and CEO of Tellence, and Leo Radu, Co-Founder and General Manager of Tellence, will join Orion’s management team. Radu will lead Orion’s Romanian team as General Manager, and Levinzon will lead sales, partnerships, and client relations in Israel and other geographies.
“Joining Orion will give us the infrastructure to further expand into the U.S. and European markets and to access a global base of engineers to help our clients scale even faster,” said Levinzon. “Our clients are expanding around the world and partnering with Orion gives us a growing set of product development and digital transformation capabilities to support their global business objectives.”
Alex Bogachek, who leads Orion’s Digital Product Development team globally, said “Tellence has a world class engineering team in Romania that will greatly benefit Orion’s clients across the globe. Adding an R&D delivery center in Romania is a perfect complement to our existing digital product development teams in Europe, across Russia, Serbia, and Lithuania. We look forward to leveraging the great engineering talent in Romania for our clients.”
Orion is a portfolio company of One Equity Partners (OEP), a middle market private equity firm focused on building market-leading companies by identifying and executing transformative business combinations.
“The addition of Tellence’s talented engineers and capabilities to Orion continues OEP’s strategy of building Orion into the leading digital transformation firm in partnership with management to solve our customers’ most complex problems,” added Chip Schorr, Senior Managing Director, One Equity Partners. “Orion has been able to augment its organic growth with a strategic acquisition program that has created a company with great vertical market depth and the broadest skill set in its industry.”

About 77% of shared service centers (SSCs) in Hungary plan to expand in future, survey results presented at a conference organized by the Hungarian Service and Outsourcing Association (HOA) on Wednesday show, according to a report by state news wire MTI.
The share is up from 66% in a survey conducted in 2018, Corvinus University docent Robert Marciniak told the conference. During the same period, the share of SSCs that expects stagnating business volume fell to 20% from 31%, he added.
About half of SSCs manage accounting activities, while 27% provide IT support and 13% customer services, according to the survey.
Réka Komáromi, a partner at consultancy EY, said 205 SSCs, with a combined headcount of close to 74,000, operate in Hungary at present. 
Tünde Kis, deputy head of the Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency (HIPA), said decision were taken on 25 investments in the sector last year, creating more than 3,000 jobs.

Swiss healthcare company Roche is expanding its EMEA shared service center in Budapest with 150 complex HR positions, Roche Szolgáltató said on Monday, according to a report by state news wire MTI.
Roche has raised headcount at its SSC in the capital from 900 to 1,300 over the past four years, and will add a further 150 staff from March. The new staff will handle recruiting, selection, compensation, benefits, business support and various marketing tasks.
The SSC provides financial, purchasing, IT and HR support for 50,000 Roche group staff in over 60 countries.

AriadNext, a European provider of solutions for digital identity, identity control, document security and digital signatures, rented 850 square meters of space in the Centro office building, a real estate project of the Tester Group, which belongs to businessman Bogdan Piţigoi. AriadNext, headquartered in France, will create 100 jobs in Iasi by the end of 2021, following the launch of a new service of the company, respectively the manual verification of the authenticity of the documents.


Radu Grădinaru, the honorary consul of France, together with Dan Zaharia, partner Extind (local company that offers specialized consultancy on the office market), handled the negotiations with the officials of the French company, assuring him that our city is able to host a such a center. In addition to Iasi, AriadNext also has centers open in Madrid, Warsaw, Rennes and Paris, from where it delivers fully automated solutions focused on artificial intelligence.

Based on Deep Learning algorithms, the IDCHECK.IO solution verifies the authenticity of an ID document and issues a verdict in less than 12 seconds. This means that AriadNext can verify almost all identity documents in a fully automated way. However, there is still a small proportion of documents for which verification cannot be performed or is incomplete, either because the document is not known by their automated services or because algorithms cannot extract the information from the document. 

In response to these challenges, AriadNext has launched a service for manually verifying the authenticity of documents in Iasi.“We chose Romania to open our center in order to offer our customers a service according to GDPR. I chose the city of Iasi more precisely because of the historical ties with France and, in addition, because the city of Iasi has the strongest growth in IT services in 2019 “, said for” Ziarul de Iaşi “ Guillaume Despagne, general manager of AriadNext.

Bogdan Piţigoi, president and founder of Tester Grup, points out that 2020 was a difficult and challenging year, “but fortunately, there are people and companies who have managed to adapt quickly to the changes brought about by the pandemic and who have participated, so , to the continued functioning of the Iași economy and, implicitly, of the Romanian economy “. “The partners of the real estate division of the Tester Group (Ideo, Centro and Solo) were very well organized to successfully continue their activity during this period in which we also took all the necessary measures so that our buildings are safe and permanently functional. . Now, the end of the year comes with very good news, the entry into Romania of a very serious and dynamic French company, which has chosen to open its headquarters in Iasi, in the C3 building in the Centro complex of the Tester Group, a modern 8-storey building , environmentally friendly, which recently received Leed Gold certification. We are glad for their entry in the select company of our partners and we wish them a spectacular further development “, Bogdan Piţigoi transmitted for” Ziarul de Iaşi “.

Societe Generale European Business Services (EBS) will change its name to Societe Generale Global Solution Centre to highlight the broader coverage of the group's service center.

The company's global presence will bring numerous opportunities to develop and optimize the quality of its services and provide employees with the opportunity to meet new, international challenges.
Different cultures will come together in the same team, looking towards new horizons and transforming the existing cultural diversity at the company level into a competitive advantage that will be noticed by the company's partners and teams on five continents, the company said.
Societe Generale European Business Services (currently Societe Generale Global Solution Center) was founded in Romania in 2011 as a service center for Societe Generale Group.

The company offers high-quality professional services in various fields of activity for the group's entities worldwide: finance and accounting, human resources, IT, Know Your Customer, compliance, and Business Advisory Unit.
"We have demonstrated over the years that together, as a team, we can be a reliable partner and that we can build a better, sustainable future with the help of innovative IT and financial solutions that we offer. The results obtained were possible thanks to the help, involvement, and thorough training of our colleagues. From now on, they will have the opportunity to develop personally and professionally to a much greater extent than before," said Matthieu Pasquier, CEO of Societe Generale GSC in Romania.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firm Teleperformance Romania plans to open another 400-500 new positions for foreign language speakers this year.
"We plan to end this year with 1,500 employees, which means that, during the year, we will open between 400 and 500 employment opportunities for foreign speakers," the company’s HR manager Tudor Petecila told Ziarul Financiar.
Currently, the company has 1,100 employees and all of them are working from home.
Typically no skills other than speaking a foreign language is required and the wages are accordingly.

"The acquisition adds approximately 1,350 cloud professionals to Accenture, bringing a highly skilled, cloud native, full stack engineering team with cloud data and cloud modernisation skills across multiple platforms from Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud Platform," a statement said.

Technology and consulting services major Accenture will acquire Imaginea, a cloud native product and platform engineering firm for an undisclosed amount. Headquartered in California, Imaginea has offices in London and India. It currently advises more than 200 global clients to deliver cloud-first transformations.

"The acquisition adds approximately 1,350 cloud professionals to Accenture, bringing a highly skilled, cloud native, full stack engineering team with cloud data and cloud modernisation skills across multiple platforms from Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud Platform," a statement said.

Completion of the acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Cloud is an essential foundation of digital transformation and leveraging cloud native capabilities helps companies transform experiences, harness advances in technologies like AI, robotics, edge computing and 5G, and break the limits on productivity and innovation to create sustainable value, Karthik Narain, global lead for Accenture Cloud First, said.

"Imaginea will further enhance the global capabilities of Accenture Cloud First, which was created to help clients across every industry become 'cloud-first' businesses," he added.

Rekha Menon, Chairperson and Senior MD at Accenture in India, said India is recognised globally for its rich innovation capabilities, and Imaginea is an outstanding example of this potential.

"I look forward to welcoming our colleagues at Imaginea to Accenture in India, and we are confident that their industry-leading cloud and product engineering skills will add immense value to our clients across key markets as they build agile and resilient businesses for the post-pandemic world," Menon added.

Powered by 70,000 cloud professionals, and a USD 3 billion investment over the next three years, the Accenture Cloud First group brings together cloud expertise, industry cloud solutions, ecosystem partner capabilities, and assets.

"Our unique combination of cloud native and product engineering skills is why clients seek out Imaginea to help them solve complex problems by unlocking the power of new technologies. Imaginea is excited to join Accenture in helping companies reimagine business and rebuild differently for the benefit of all - from their customers to our people to society at large," Vijay Pullur, co-founder of Imaginea, said.

Thyssenkrupp launches another electromobility-related development project in Veszprém, where the company will establish an engineering service centre with an investment of slightly more than EUR 6 million. As a result, 80 new engineering positions will be created within two years.
Thyssenkrupp Components Technology Hungary Kft. was founded in 2007. It operates branches in many places throughout the country in addition to its headquarters in Budapest with a total of more than 2,300 employees.
The company carries out both R&D and production activities in Hungary: it manufactures electromechanical steering servos and camshafts in Jászfényszaru, produces stabilizers and springs in Debrecen, while operates a chassis assembly plant and a Steel Service Centre in Győr.
The company develops electromechanical power steering systems at its Budapest competence centre, which are able to cooperate with a wide range of driving support or self-steering systems. In just a few years, the centre has become an international leader and it is now considered one of the best in the world in its field.
The engineering service centre in Veszprém will support the special automotive R&D activities of the German large enterprise in Hungary, which is unique in the whole world.