Bulgaria's outsourcing sector is expected to generate 8.9% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) by 2022, Bulgaria's Association for Innovation, Business Excellence, Services and Technology (AIBEST) said on Thursday.Bulgaria's sourcing industry contributed 5.5% to the country's GDP in 2019, up from 5.2% in the previous year, AIBEST said in its 2020 Annual Industry Report, citing data from an analysis prepared by SeeNews.
According to the report, the revenues of the companies operating in Bulgaria's outsourcing sector rose by an annual 19.6% to 2.9 billion euro ($3.5 billion) last year. The analysis comprises data for 610 local companies engaged in business process sourcing (BPO) and information technology sourcing (ITO).
Preliminary data shows that the outsourcing sector in Bulgaria will post double-digit growth in 2020 as well, AIBEST said.
The industry is also strengthening its position as a preferred employer, as evidenced by the growing number of people working in the sector, as well as the rising costs of employees and taxes paid by companies, AIBEST said, adding that the sourcing sector accounts for 3.5% of the Bulgarian labour market.
Outsourcing services providers in Bulgaria employed some 78,000 people at the end of 2019, or 5,000 more compared to 2018. At the end of August 2020, the number of employees reached 81,000, according to AIBEST data.
The unprecedented health crisis which hit the world in early 2020, naturally impacted the technology and business services sector, as well, but it also unlocked the digitalisation and innovation potential of the sector, llia Krustev, Chairman of the AIBEST Managing Board, said.
"Due to its membership in the EU, its well-developed digital infrastructure and extensive talent pool, Bulgaria is well poised to attract new investments as Western companies contemplate relocating operations to regions which are closer to their headquarters," Krustev added. "The extent to which we avail ourselves of this opportunity in the next year or two will be crucial with regard to how Bulgaria emerges from the crisis, how well it positions itself in respect to its global competitors and how quickly it catches up with the older members of the EU in terms of GDP levels."

German technology group Ratiodata has acquired Romanian digital services company  Accesa for an undisclosed sum, Accesa said.
Through the acquisition, Ratiodata Group will enhance its capabilities to support customers’ end-to-end digital evolution needs, Accesa said in a press release on Monday.
"We are now excited to welcome Accesa and its talented professionals within the Ratiodata Group, strengthening our capabilities to deliver complete digital evolution journeys for major brands in both regulated and non-regulated markets; covering hardware, engineering, as well as software development and managed services solutions across the DACH region," Ratiodata board spokesman Martin Greiwe said.
Ratiodata Group said it aims to hire around 400 additional IT professionals over the next three years, including risk specialists, engineers with experience in key technologies, as well as professionals with strong analytical and German-language skills in Romania.
Earlier this year, Arcesa and Ratiodata founded RARo, a joint venture that bundles the two companies' competencies to accelerate business evolution in highly regulated markets like banking, insurance and healthcare.
As it joins its sister-company RARo as part of the Ratiodata Group, Acdcesa will have a shared Romanian – German management team.
RARo will engage with companies in regulated industries, while Accesa will target non-regulated ones, providing complete digital evolution services for their clients through a right mix of on-site and remote service delivery capabilities.
Accesa was founded in 2004 in Romania's northwestern city of Cluj-Napoca, and now has offices in Oradea. Outside of Romania, the company has offices in Zurich and Munich. Accesa employs more than 700 IT professionals in its over 20 competence centres.
Ratiodata AG is one of the largest system houses and service providers for banking technology and document digitalisation in Germany with around 1,400 employees in 14 locations and branch offices nationwide. Its annual turnover exceeds 300 million euro ($356 million). 

IBM Client Innovation Centre in Székesfehérvár, which provides IT services, server operation, system management and development, and cloud-based services, has decided to create 300 new jobs. The almost EUR 9.7 million investment to be realized by 31 December 2021 will be carried out while retaining the current number of employees.
The task of new colleagues is planned to be related to the remote monitoring of computer software systems. Remote monitoring means the supervision of the functioning of operational and financial activities, teamwork promoting and corresponding, as well as production support systems of foreign clients.

Developing and operating software for the number 1 Swiss telecommunications provider and one of the leading IT companies in the Swiss market from Latvia: Swisscom locates its second European DevOps Center in Riga. The investment project has been implemented in close cooperation with the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia.
Swisscom is the number 1 telecommunications provider and one of the leading IT companies in Switzerland. Its products and services range from B2C products, such as Swisscom blue TV, to B2B IT solutions in multiple industries, such as Banking, Health, Energy, Entertainment and Advertising. Living up to its ambition to lead the way as a responsible organization, corporate citizen and employer, Swisscom is one of Switzerland’s most sustainable and innovative companies. For several years, the company has continually been voted one of the most attractive employers by Swiss IT professionals, alongside Microsoft and Google.
Innovation is deeply rooted in the Swisscom DNA; both in terms of technology and in forms of collaboration. Facing a continuously growing IT skills gap with rising demand and insufficient supply within Switzerland, combined with an ambition to establish a leading DevOps organization in Europe by 2025, looking further afield was the next logical step for Swisscom.

Riga the ideal location for continuing Swisscom’s DevOps Center successRiga offers the ideal location for Swisscom’s second DevOps unit abroad after Rotterdam. Latvia is widely acknowledged as a centre for IT, software and digitalisation excellence and is raising the next generation of qualified IT experts through the local educational system.
Swisscom's DevOps Center in Riga was established on 8 October 2020 with the first engineers pencilled in to start work from January 2021; initially, from temporary premises at Workland Telegraph, and later from the permanent offices in Z-Towers with a stunning view over Riga. The plan is to grow the Center to 40 employees by the end of 2021. The recruitment phase is starting now.

FULL STORY HERE.

Riga City Council has made a forward-looking decision to set up Riga Investment and Tourism agency - a separate Riga municipality owned establishment responsible for tourism attraction and building the recognition of Riga as highly chosen location for Global Businesses.


Starting from now investors will be even more welcome and individually supported by Riga municipality on their way to settle down in Riga. 🚀

👉"Setting up Riga Investment and Tourism agency is a step in the right direction, however there is substantial need to build highly qualified team of professionals in order reach our goal - become business metropolis of Baltics. The newly formed Riga Investment and Tourism agency has to become a strong partner in discussions with foreign investors," comments ABSL Latvia Chairman of the Board Fredis Bikovs.

Flo Health—the developer of Flo, the first AI-powered app for women’s health—is about to open a new office in Vilnius. The company plans active hiring focused on engineering within next 3 years.
Flo is one of the most popular Health & Fitness apps in over 100 countries around the world, and is chosen by over 150 million women worldwide, with 36 million active monthly users. In the European Union alone, there are a total of 30M installs and 8M active monthly users. It is also the #1 app in the Health and Fitness category in Lithuanian App Store (November 2020).
Flo supports women during the entire menstrual cycle. It is a one-stop health solution for women of all ages—from puberty to menopause. Flo’s content and functionality are developed with the help of over 80 European and North American medical doctors and scientists who are passionate about making health information accessible to every woman in the world. Based on the analysis of 70+ user symptoms, Flo uses data science and AI to deliver personalized cycle predictions, multimedia health content, numerous chatbots that help women learn more about their bodies.
“The new Lithuanian team will support the growth of the world’s leading platform for women’s health using the latest technologies. Product and Engineering make over 50% of our team. Our employees have an average of 10 years’ experience, working alongside leaders in their respective areas. I’m excited to invite talented Lithuanian engineers to join our team so that they follow their professional aspirations with us. Flo is a product that is constantly evolving. New features and technologies are added, and development hardens. The user only sees a small part of what goes into our product, with its functionality being continuously updated. We plan to strengthen and double our engineering capacity, relying on Lithuanian talents in the next year. The team will include Scala Engineers, Android and iOS Engineers, Data Science, and Machine Learning specialists. I’m certain there will be many interesting challenges for our engineering team”, states Roman Bugaev, Chief Technical Officer, Flo Health.
Flo is looking for Senior and higher-level professionals who are ready to rise up to daunting challenges and come up with non-standard solutions.
“The team in Lithuania will play a significant role in the company’s product development. Every solution we develop here will impact millions of women in the world and will support their health and wellbeing. I’m absolutely confident there will be tons of exciting challenges that will be solved thanks to the advanced and state-of-the-art engineering solutions from our teams”, Andrei Kurylionak, Head of Recruitment, Flo Health.
“In the past few years, the healthtech sector has been on the rise globally. The digital technology solutions are increasingly driving the future of the healthcare sector. We are very proud that such a rapidly growing global brand as Flo Health chose Lithuania as one of their product development hubs. This proves that our highly skilled talent and attractive tech infrastructure can be a great accelerator for high growth companies”, says Mantas Katins, the managing director at Invest Lithuania.

Coherent Solutions, a US-based software development company, has announced plans to establish a full-scale software development centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. The company expects to hire at least 100 specialists over the next three years.
Headquartered in Minneapolis, Coherent Solutions is an American company with Belarussian roots. Founded in 1995 by Minsk-born Igor Epshteyn, the company has self-funded its steady growth, averaging a 25% annual increase in revenue over the last 15 years. Today, Coherent Solutions has more than 1400 employees across offices in the US, Belarus and Bulgaria.
Over the years, Coherent Solutions has expanded from a web development company to a full life-cycle software services provider, offering software architecture, UX design, DevOps, and quality assurance services. The company also provides software solutions in areas of data management, AI and machine learning, mobile development, and Salesforce app development. Coherent Solutions develops digital products primarily for US companies, Europe being their secondary market. The company has completed over 1000 projects for both startups and Fortune 1000 companies in technology, healthcare, fitness, e-commerce, manufacturing, and other industries.
Coherent Solutions is planning to build a full-scale development centre in Vilnius that will host cross-functional software teams. Igor Epshteyn, founder and CEO of Coherent Solutions, explains why the company is excited about its plans in Lithuania: “One of Coherent’s primary competitive advantages is our ability to be an advisor and innovator for its customers. Lithuania’s strong reputation as a hub of innovation matches this perfectly and promises strong synergies for our company.”

Coherent expects to hire at least 100 specialists in Lithuania until 2023. The company will be looking to fill cross-functional technology roles, including technical architects, application developers, data developers, DevOps engineers, quality assurance and business analysts, UX designers, and project managers. Coherent hopes to establish a team of IT specialists with a range of experience levels – from fresh university graduates up to the most experienced and skilled professionals in the technology industry.
Coherent plans to be the first workplace for many freshly-minted developers. “Hiring new university graduates is a key part of our growth model, and we expect to do the same in Lithuania long-term,” says Mr. Epshteyn. According to him, employee growth is one of the pillars of the company’s success. “As a consulting company, our people are our product. We invest a significant amount of money in training and ongoing professional development,” he explains.

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 “.

Compared to the volume of commercial transactions, France is for Romania the third customer and the sixth supplier, and the French direct investments in our country have reached a level of almost 5 billion euros, according to the French Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Romania (CCIFER) – the main animator of a community of over 550 companies with French capital in Romania, with a presence in all industries and which totals a total turnover of over 8.5 billion euros.“One of the main missions in my capacity as Honorary Consul of France in Iasi is to promote the opportunities offered by our city to potential French investors. I am glad that such an approach was a complete and rapid success in the case of the French company AriadNext, which, in just a few months and especially in such a delicate period, managed to set up an IT production entity in our city, which once again confirms the attractiveness of Iasi as a pole for the development of creative, advanced, innovative industries. In addition, this successful French project is for me an additional impetus in my efforts to establish a francophone business club, which will coagulate in the near future the positive energies of French or francophone companies in Iasi and the region “, said Radu Gradinaru, the honorary consul of France.

Dan Zaharia considers that the choice made by the French company is “a signal of confidence that Iasi receives as a result of the continuous effort to position the city on the map of Central Eastern Europe (EEC)”.“In the midst of a health crisis, the Extind team successfully negotiated the bringing of a new outsourcing company to Iasi. AriadNext chose Iasi as the location for its headquarters in Romania, rented 850 square meters of offices for 100 employees in the Centro building. One of the selection criteria for this modern office building was the holding of the international LEED Gold certificate for green buildings. It is a signal of trust that our city receives as a result of our continuous effort to position Iasi on the map of the CEE region as a magnet for IT & Outsourcing companies “, mentioned Dan Zaharia, Extind partner.